LINGUA INGLESE II

12 October 12, 2022

21 lessons (until December – January)

Text center-aligned (testo centrato)

Audiovisual translation

Three main language transfer practices exist side by side: subtitling, dubbing, voice-over.

Why using it? – Language awareness

According to Dirk Delabastita, film is a complex meaningful sign consisting of a multitude of codes.
The codes are the verbal (dialects), literary and theatrical (dialogue), proxemic and kinetic, and
cinematic (genres).
He points out four basic elements:

1- the acoustic-verbal (dialogue)

2- the acoustic-nonverbal (noises)
3- the visual-nonverbal (image, gestures)
4- the visual-verbal (inserts, banner, letters)

DUBBING: is the replacement of the original speech by a voice track which attempts to follow as
closely as possible the timing, phrasing, and lip-movements of the original dialogue.

SUBTLITLING: is the rendering in a different language of verbal messages in filmic media in the
shape of one or more lines of written text presented on the screen in synchrony with the original
message

VOICE-OVER: is a type of re-voicing, it means that encompassing a range of spoken translation

methods, including simultaneous interpreting. Voice-over is commonly known as a “cheap
alternative to dubbing” (Academy awards, MTV)

 It’s an aspect of the soundtrack particularly associated with narrative. Sarach Kozloff makes a
distinction between voice-over narration and other forms of off-screen voice:
-Interior monologue (a character’s thoughts)
-Subjective sound
-Reading of a plot-turning letter

>> the general definition is: “oral statements, conveying any portion of a narrative, spoken by an
unseen speaker situated in a space and time other than that simultaneously being presented by
the images on the screen”
FIGS countries: France, Italy, Germany, and Spain (who prefer subtitling)

SUBTITLING PROS AND CONS:

-Translators must respect integrally the original dialogues

-It can have didactical advantages for communities of immigrants
-The audience can hear the real voices of actors
-The times of realization are quite short
-It’s cheaper than dubbing
-It’s politically correct in terms of linguistic transfer

Or

-The translation does not reproduce exactly what it is said

-It’s impossible to translate sociolinguistic expressions, dialects of uncommon linguistic forms
-Frequently, subtitling is not synchronized with the actors’ dialogues

THE LINGUISTICS OF SUBTITLING:

The six seconds’ rule: recommended maximum exposure

The length of lines: one or two lines of some 37 to 39 characters including spaces (in general if
information suits in one line is better, if not, two lines are allowed but the first has to be shorter
than the second one)

Synchronization: a subtitle should appear at the precise moment the person starts speaking, for
this reason 6 second is the recommended one

Line break: segmentation rules mean to divide something into separate parts or sections made
with logic sense (semantically), to simplify memory span of viewers of any age group.
//ogni rigo è associato ad una preposizione//

Ex.

-The destruction of the

city was inevitable

-The destruction of the city

was inevitable

- The second choice it’s better because the space creates a sense of suspense bridge (ponte
sospensivo)
 THE SUBTITLING PROCESS

The subtitling process involves three basic steps: elimination, rendering, and condensation.

Elimination consists in reducing elements that do not change the meaning of the source dialogue
such as false starts, repetitions, and hesitation

Rendering refers to the elimination of taboo items, slang, and dialect

Condensation involves the simplification of original syntax to render the subs more easily readable

In order to systematize the differences between original and translated audiovisual texts, scholars
apply comparative models.
John Catford introduces the generic notions of SHIFT to designate any changes from the source
text to target text.
The, Jorge Díaz-Cintas proposes a classification of subtitling strategies and shifts
- Exercise 6.3 (book)

I’m gonna have this place fixed up..then I’m gonna sell it  I’ll fix this place and then I’ll sell
it

I should really be going actually  I must go / I have to leave

I have always treated her right  I was good to her

Her father had thrown her out  He threw her out

I started working  I got/found a job

I was in a deep sleep  I slept soundly

- Exercise “Alice in Wonderland”

Words omitted in the text listened in class:

you see, well, why don’t you try, I was just;

CULTURE-BOUND WORDS

-These terms are extralinguistic references to items that are tied up with a country’s
culture, history, or geography. They tend to pose serious translation challenges.

(Such as tornado, mistral, zebra, plaza mayor, igloo, ranch, gringo, Thanksgiving, sheriff,
marines)

-By cultural reference we mean any reference to a cultural entity which, due to its distance
from target culture is characterized by a sufficient degree of opacity for the target reader
to constitute a problem.

-The expression culture shock means “a condition of disorientation affecting someone who
is suddenly exposed to an unfamiliar culture or way of life or set of attitudes”
 Archer defines culture bumps

To solve: the term chunking has been taken from computing, it means to change the side
of a unit. A unit can be made bigger which means that as more comes into view, so we
move from the specific to the general, or from the part to the whole.
Translators opt for:

a) Chunking upwards, using hypernymy (more general) //parrozzo -> chocolate cupcake//
b) Chunking downwards, by replacing with more specific references
//parrozzo -> black muffin//
c) Chunking sideways, and replacing with same level equivalents (transposition)

Compensation: in English, linguine is translated as linguine pasta

Additions: adding more information to better explain the context

Calque: eccitante -> exiting (semantic calque); l’hai detto -> you said it (syntactical calque);
sicuro -> sure (invece di certo)  errors

Substitution: a variant of explicitation and it’s more used is subtitling. It refers to the
substitution of a term with another one that can have a far link with the original term or do
not have it at all (crea un vago legame con l’originale)  it’s used to create
synchronization

(In subtitling advertising is omitted) > Friends subtitling techniques of Play-Doh toys
 HUMORISM

As a multidisciplinary field of study, and it has been the focus of interest to many
academies raging from Anthropology to Cinema studies.
There has been an increasing interest in humor ingressions in the movies in Translation
studies.

Translating audiovisual humor poses a genuine challenge to the translator, and more, to
the subtitler.

 It can be considered another culturally connoted element, and for this reason, it is
hardly transmittable from one culture to another.
Cicero was the first to observe that VEH (verbally expressed humor), then he divided
linguistic and referential (in De Oratore);
Salvatore Attardo was interest in puns, with all the translation methods regarded.

Humor will be perceived according to three presuppositions:

- Firstly, humor and laughter which are correlated but are different
- Secondly, humor is a subjective and relative concept, differing from individual to individual
- Finally, humor and intelligence are correlated.

In many frames of Frankenstein, humor is about linguistic misunderstanding between real or fake
name pronunciation. (Simple understanding)
In another frame, we have homophonic differences which create puns, that in Italian were
translated in different ways.

Delia Chiaro distinguished between three categories of humor:

1- UNIVERSALLY FUNNY: international, such as someone who slipf on a banana skin.

2- HUMOR LINKED TO FUNNY SCENE: such as Mr. Bean of Charlie Chaplin, everything related
to funny expressions of movements
3- HUMOR LINKED TO THE WORD: the hardest to translate, because it’s different to find
translation in another culture or literature

Freud analyzed jokes, and he noticed that eros, money and death are the most “funny scene”.

Chiaro also proposed five different strategies for translation of humor in screen:

1- Leave the verbally expressed humor unchanged.

2- Substitute VEH with different instance in the target language (the most common choice)
3- Replace the source VEH with idiomatic expression
4- Ignore it
5- Literally translated (the worst one).
NATIONAL CULTURE JOKES: It’s culture-bound, strictly connected to INSTITUTION

COMMUNITY SENSE OF HUMOR: many communities make jokes at the expense of sub-
communities inside their borders, or poke fun at other nationalities. The humor can have religious
overtones, or be based on historical events, sometimes even racism it’s used.
In Italy It’s more related to for example policeman.

 for example, language-dependent jokes are substituted and compensated such as in Pretty
Woman.

October 26, 2022

Sherlock: “the brain is an empty attic”  the author tries to explain how to be a master of
deduction and to select information from the knowledge stored in our brains. (metaphor)

The fiction does incarnate the pioneer of Forensic science and criminal investigation.

Deductive reasoning can be summarized by the sentence “you can see, but you do not observe.
The distinction is clear”
 The more information you can gather, the more accurate you’ll be
Among over 200 film versions of Sherlock Holmes, the 2010 masterpiece version, remediated the
Victorian detective stories without ever undercutting the flair and dazzle of the original.
Sherlock appears to the perfect depiction of Holmes for our times.

INCONGRUITY is defined as a contradiction of cognitive schemes which can also be interpreted as

a deviation from a generally accepted norm. (Contrast between what it’s said and what you can
see)
>> examples of irony’s perlocutionary effect

>> It’s also considered in Discourse Analysis by Austin and Searle – speech act theory.

In Sherlock there’s a lot of SUPERIORITY HUMOR (such as woman’s lipstick changed in the first
episode)

 as far as the concept of superiority is concerned Vandaele defines it as a form of increased

happiness related to a heightened self-esteem, that is, besides causing laughter, humor can also
make all or some of the parties involved feel they are better than others.

“Being superior is always being superior to someone”  it’s related to sarcasm and “social
aggression”

>> “Houston, we have a mistake”, and all the scene around skull and Watson

From a subtitling perspective:

 The linguistic of subtitling and text-reduction shift are useful analyzing tools in order to
demonstrate that crime may be conceptualized in subtitling. Through dialogues, subtitling may be
considered as a form of deduction in audio-visual crime fiction.

In general, according to Geoffrey Wagnes, there could be three types of re-adaptation from
literacy work to movies:

 Transposition, without differences

 Commentary, it’s purposely altered in some respect, but the essence is the same
 Analogy, which must represent a considerable departure for the sake of making another
work of art

 Sherlock is more a commentary than an analogy

 Differences between book and TV series:

SHERLOCK SUBTITLING CONSIDERATION:

 With Sherlock we don’t have a perfect synchronization because Sherlock stream of

thoughts are impossible to respect
 In BBC Sherlock there’s not always respect to the two-line subtitles because it gives us
too much information to condensate (it does not follow the number of characters)
 There’s a change of punctuation since the job to the subtitler is to facilitate this
reading exercise (for example dashes are eliminated because we often associated to
different people talking)
 Use of rhetoric segmentation to emphasize memories, something important or to give
suspense. The subtitler segments sentences creating the “suspension bridge”, in fact
BBC Sherlock seems not to respect grammatical cohesion because it creates a more
comfortable reading (priority to rhetorical segmentation). This seems also to respect
the natural speech prosody.
 Lots of superiority technique between many characters, above all Sherlock (but also
when the woman call him freak)
 SUBTITLING CULTURES:

This often happens in co-productions or in films that make use of the different languages spoken in
the producing country in order to reflect the pursuit of realism as part of the new wave amongst
filmmakers seeking to represent conditions of migrant and diasporic existence.
The subtitler needs to be aware of this in order to decide what can and must be subtitled.

 Multilingual films: for example, in a film with English language with a very few references to
other languages, they can be avoided.

Canadian film industry is recently promoting the flowering of an indigenous Inuit cinema, a
cultural phenomenon which appears to be confirming the existence of Fourth cinema (which
represents the indigenous’ customs and habits) -> it’s his perspective, for example by seeing
colonizers’ ships coming from the sea while standing on the beach.

One of the problems in, for example, the Inuit language (Inuktitut) refers to the longer Inuit
language which are more difficult to respect in subtitling.
Watching an Inuit movie is a dynamic and unforgettable experience, involving a process of
renewing attention to create and follow the relations between words, images, and subtitles. Due
to the polysynthetic nature characterised by a very rich morphologic system, interlingua subtitling
can be described as a foreignizing.

Reference to Maïna movie, where this young and rebellious girl falls in love with a man from a
rival clan  It’s a kind of Romeo and Juliet in which everything occurs before the European
contacts.

- Mystical references such as the song part is not traduced or subtitled

>> it’s interesting that the normal dialogue is subtitled, instead the interior protagonist
monologue is led by voice-over with an English Canadian accent.
This technique is the easiest and most faithful translation modes because it’s the sole
solution to render inner thoughts and reflections on the languages spoken by Innu and
Inuit.

Deictic-shift theory:
- The world of a text/film consists of one or more deictic fields, which are composed of a whole
range of expressions each of which can be categorised as perceptual, spatial, temporal, textual
and compositional in nature.
When a deictic shift occurs, it can be either “up” or “down” the virtual planes of deictic fields. Each
of us is attracted by different acoustic and/or elements due to push into or push up methods.

PUSH INTO: a lower deictic field (entering flashbacks, dreams, and stories by character)
PUSH UP: the narrative level
>> The compulsory subtitling techniques can be avoided when we talk about culture (such as
Segmentation), in the Maina movie case it doesn’t respect the two-lines subtitles because the
source language (due to the grammar) is more difficult.
 use of triple dots (tre punti di sospensione) used to create a bridge of suspense in order to let
us understand that the sentence is not finished yet; thanks to this there’s the respect of prosodic
feature of the speech.

 One of the most significant scenes are those shot inside the igloo, in which the kinesics is
difficult (almost impossible) to render in subtitling, because it gives more information.
Like any form of iconography, Inuit’s body-postures and gestures communicate something non-
vocally which are often culture-bound. The challenge resides in the detection of coherence
between movement or closeness and intonation, word choice, as well as other linguistic
features.

 This movie is incredible because the conceptual blends is a respected mechanism

14 of November

EMMA:

- Adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel, one of the best movies produced.

From novel to movie = subtle irony  comedy of manners

It’s Austen’s most accomplished and wittiest novel about a matchmaker doing all the
wrong things for all the right reasons.

Emma is a mature a brilliant comedy of manners, or better to say a comedy of errors,

abound with humour. Emma’s snobbery and perfect lack of self-awareness make her ideas
of romance that much more entertaining.

Ambiguities: misunderstandings, contradictions and obscurity of expressions characterise

the dialogues of character who are merely obsessed with rank, class, and manners,
violating the so-called Grice’s maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner -> creating
a comic effect.

First scene: humour referred to Emma’s father -> incongruity. Lots of British features such
as characters, language, landscape. The subtitler challenge is not copy the culturally
connoted element which is hardly to transfer.
It’s a hard humour to transfer, because it combines many different funny: universally
funny, humour linked to funny scenes (Emma’s expressions), and humour linked to the
word.
 Emma’s humour typically expresses her femininity and contradictory personality, so a
particular complex form of jokes (together with fake smiles, col stares and childish knowing
looks).
 Visual jokes when Emma is faking smiles and make laugh of other people, by conveying
her inner thoughts (and so information) thanks to her facial expression.
-But the most typical expressions of audio-visual humour in Emma is summarised by
Vandaele who characterises the phenomenon of INCONGRUITY and SUPERIORIRY (Emma
feels superior to the others so it makes us a sort of humour)
 references to Discourse analysis = there are many examples of irony’s perlocutionary
effects in the film deriving from incongruity where laughter is the effect most associated
with humour.

 this is called Negative politeness, apart from the numerous times Emma expresses her
good intentions by uttering such sentences as “Oh it’s not my place to intrude”  Emma’s
subtle irony produced by her negative politeness can minimise the impositions.
>> the strategies referred include questioning, hedging, and presenting disagreements as
opinions (other techniques are being indirect, request forgiveness, minimize imposition,
pluralize the persons responsible);

In many Emma’s subtitles we can recognize the target-oriented techniques used by the
subtitler (he surely thought the audience, the Italian one); then there is the use of “voi” in
Italian, which tries to repeat the 18th English language, full of negative politeness.
Use of the upwards (generalization) and rhetoric segmentation, many under translation
because they miss the humour in many subtitles (many times happens).

>> Humour in interlingual subtitling, as suggest by Delabastita, involves shifts which fail to
produce a counterpart such as the existence of alliteration.
All evidence suggest that the segmentation and line breaks are aimed to reflecting the
dialogue’s dynamics and in a way at rendering SPEECH IN WRITING. This is what Diaz-
Cintas calls RHETORICAL SEGMENTATION which tries to take some of meaningful features
of spoken language into account (hesitations and pauses, real prosody).

SUPERIORITY: this feature highlights humour’s very visible social functioning: being
superior is always being superior-to-someone. Emma is a particular case study for this
reference because she’s obsessed with her own superiority and importance, and her
MORBID HUMOUR, in which she tells a morbid joke trying to provoke laughter.

“Your entire personality is a riffle, Mr. Knightley. I thought you were overqualified”
 sarcastic expression which is every time more amusing, even because we can perceive
Emma as a master-like position (feminine humour) to other masculine character, older and
wiser than her.
21 of November

CONFERENCE INTERPRETING:

It is conveying a message spoken in one language into another. It is practised at international

summits, professional seminars, and bilateral or multilateral meetings of heads of State and
Government. Conference interpreting also work at meetings between chief executives, social and
union representatives at congress and meetings and so on.
They need an immediate grasp of their passive languages and a well-developed capacity to express
themselves in their own language.

Another essential requirement is a good mind, a good level of general education, analytic capacity,
the ability to put themselves is the minds of the people for whom they are interpreting.
They also need:
- Be able to concentrate
- Have a good memory
- Have a pleasant voice and good diction

 Conference interpreting is the most prestigious and highly remunerative form of

interpreting but equally the most demanding one

Three modes are now recognized by the interpreting Profession: simultaneous, consecutive and
sight translation.

SIMULTANEOUS: is the rendering of one spoken language into another when running renditions
are needed at the same time as the English language communication.

Keys for proper simultaneous interpreting:

 Listen intently
 Accurately interpret
 Be prepared to switch rapidly

CONSECUTIVE: the interpreter waits until the speaker has finished before rendering speech.
It should have been done without omissions or embellishments, so that the parties can
understand each other slowly and deliberately.

Keys:
 Prepared to take notes to aid in recollection
 Only finished speech we can render (at least 15 minutes we can wait)

SIGH TRANSLATION: rendering of material written in one language into spoken speech in another
language. It’s verbal translation.

Keys:
 Possess a wide vocabulary and knowledge of the specific type of document
 Can quickly scan the document
 PRODUCTION AND MEMORY EFFORTS:

 The production effort, which is defined as the output part of interpretation

 The memory effect, where phonetic segments may have to be added up in memory
and analysed. (the most difficult referred to the consecutive mode)

Each effort has specific processing capacity requirements that depend on the tasks it is engaged in,
namely the comprehension, short-term memory, or production operations being performed on
speech segments.

MEMORY: according to Darò there are the “primary and secondary memory”  these correspond
to the modern terms of long-term memory and short-term (LTM and STM), respectively the latter
being later referred to as working memory.

Lambert explains that during listening no vocalisation is required and thus is devoted only to one
ask.

>> To facilitate everything, scholars developed a particular system based on Rozan’s 7 principles
and 20 symbols. (After the FWW at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919).

It should be only the inspiration because, interpreting students learn the Rozan’s system and then
develop their own note-taking method., composed of symbols, abbreviations, and words in the A-
language, B- language)

In language comprehension there is a basic distinction between bottom-up and top-down

operations, both being essential for and encompassing account of comprehension since it is seen
as a dynamic process.
Thus, processing new information requires the build-up of a mental representation resulting from
the interaction between the input and already existing information whether lexical, semantic,
syntactic, pragmatic…

Which language do interpreters use?

-A few authors focused on analysing which language dominates during taking notes.
Some authors like Gerard Ilg and Daniel suggest using the source language while others (Herbert,
Rozan) suggest employing the target language, in order to facilitate the production phase.

Seleskovitch, Kirchhoff and Andres found that interpreters use a mix of source and target
language. There then can also be the influence of THE THIRD LANGUAGE or C-language which can
give us different facilities.
Exercise:

Trampoline
Elephant
Piano
Pineapple
Truck
Basketball

Words:

Statue of liberty
Fireworks
Cigarette
Skateboard
Barack Obama
Doll
Cake
Ferrari
Watermelon
Chicken
Dog (?)
Giraffe

NOTE-TAKING:

It’s an important skill in consecutive interpreting.

Intended only the interpreter’s immediate use as a memory-efficiency supplement, it is especially
individual.
The Rozan’s 7 principles:
- 1- Noting the idea and not the word
- 2- The relus of abbreviation
- 3- Links
- 4- Negation
- 5- Emphasis
- 6- Verticality
- 7- Shift

Paradox can be that note-taking is also regarded as evil because it may split the power of attention
and interfere in one’s listening. Especially for beginners of consecutive.

1: “there’s a very good chance to” -> key words: chance -> idea: probable
2: if a word is short (4-5 letters) should not be abbreviated, instead a longer one can be reduced.
Write as few words or symbols as possible. An interpreter should always concentrate on listening,
then he must practice the maxim of “economy in words” while taking notes.
As a rule, the notes should be of such a type that each word or symbol usually represents a key
concept.
The notes have to be logical and legible by using a small number of symbols -> they can also be
created but they should appear frequently.