Translating popular film and the intercultural imagination
By: Carol O'Sullivan
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Basingstoke
Language: eng
Number of pages: 243
ISBN-13: 9780230573918
Subjects: Motion pictures; Translating and interpreting; Titling; Dubbing of motion pictures
Description: In recent years, foreign languages and subtitles have moved out of the arthouse into the multiplex, with films such as Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, Traffic and Inglourious Basterds. Foreign languages have always been part of popular cinema - think of The Third Man or Treasure of the Sierra Madre - but often foreign speech has been represented in English or reduced to the hubbub of voices in the background. This book deals with the tradition of foreign languages in the cinema, showing how a diverse range of devices and narrative conventions has evolved to represent and translate foreign languages for cinema audiences. Devices such as the translating dissolve, the close-up, the ludic subtitle and the narrational subtitle used in films from the silent period to today are analysed in the light of cinema's mission to tell stories about characters who don't share a language with the cinema audience.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references, filmography and index.
Table of contents: title: Mimesis and film languages; title: The dream of instant translation; title: Before and beyond subtitles; title: Subtitling and the ethics of representation; title: Where are the subtitles? metalepsis, subtitling and narration; title: Translating multilingualism on screen.