Translating culture-specific references in subtitling: ''This is England'' as a case study

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Introduction 
Over the last few decades, the rapid development of the film and television industries has 
led Europe to deal more often than ever with the cultural and linguistic differences 
between the various countries. Since cinema and television are the most familiar and 
widely used media, the amount of products that needs to be translated, or better, adapted, 
to different realities is constantly growing. Therefore, a specific type of translation known 
as audiovisual translation (AVT) is necessary. This is a specialised branch of translation 
which refers to the features of audiovisual products, which use both sight and hearing to 
convey information and are therefore multimedia texts. The multimodal nature of these 
products often involves a more or less marked process of adaptation which could alter the 
structure of the source text. For this reason, many scholars have long refused to consider 
AVT as a type of translation and thus only recently it has achieved a scientific status. 
As they are multimodal texts and therefore much more complex than a written text, 
audiovisual products are characterised by limits to which the translator must comply. 
Audiovisual translation has even greater limits if it is done through subtitles. In a subtitled 
film, the elements that can not be modified by the subtitler-translator are two: not only 
the visual one, but also the acoustic one. The translation is then offered through sentences 
that appear on the screen in a written form, thus adding a third semiotic channel besides 
images and audio. The coexistence of different communication channels requires the 
translator to use strategies that are sometimes different from those implemented for other 
types of text. 
Like any other type of translation, audiovisual translation implies the transfer of a 
message from one language to another, and as each language is the expression of a culture, 
it must necessarily be taken into account when translating. If cultural differences are of 
great importance in the translation of any type of text, their influence is particularly 
evident when an element appears whose cultural connotation is part of the meaning that 
the text intends to convey. In these cases, how should the translator behave? There is no 
single answer to the question, but the issue has been widely debated in the theory of 
translation. One of the main difficulties for the translator is often that he/her has to choose
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between being as faithful as possible to the original text or making an adaptation. This 
paper will examine how culture-specific references are treated in audiovisual translation, 
particularly in subtitling, using as a case study Shane Meadows’ 2006 film This is 
England.  
The objective will be to understand which are the most widely used translation strategies 
in the presence of culture-specific references (CSRs) and verify if it is possible to bring 
out correspondences between the applied strategies and the results obtained in terms of 
fidelity to the original text or adaptation in favor of the target public. The analysis will 
always take into account the relationship between the original dialogue and the translated 
subtitle. Attention will also be paid to the connotations of the analysed parts of dialogue, 
in order to verify the correspondence between the original text and the translated one. 
Chapter one will provide a general overview of AVT, listing the various translation 
techniques, with a particular focus on subtitling and its constraints. In Chapter two, two 
models of classification of translation strategies will be analysed: Gottlieb’s model and 
Lomheim’s model. These models will be then compared, justifying the choice of 
Lomheim’s model for the analysis presented in Chapter three. This Chapter will end with 
one of the most challenging issues for a translator/subtitler, i.e. the translation of CSRs. 
The last chapter will include an analysis of different sentences or part of dialogues 
containing CSRs which will be analysed from a cultural point of view and classified 
according to Lomheim’s model. Finally, in the conclusions a summary of the analysis 
will be presented, stating the emerging elements and the difficulties encountered.
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Chapter 1   
 
Audiovisual translation and subtitling 
1.1   An introduction to audiovisual translation 
During the 1980s and the 1990s, the political and economic unification process of Europe 
led to an increasing need for translation in the audiovisual media. In those years the role 
of European linguistic minorities was reconsidered and an attempt was made to strengthen 
the sense of identity among European citizens. In this framework, mass media had an 
enormous power and it was therefore crucial to channel their influence in the right 
direction, i.e. to facilitate communication between members of the European Union 
(Petillo 2008: 12). 
Since then, the situation has changed thanks to globalisation, digitalisation and 
developments in the field of information technology. All of these changes promoted a 
rapid spread of audiovisual media distribution, making a great variety of audiovisual 
products available in different languages. For this reason, a solution needed to be found 
to allow this material to circulate despite language barriers. Consequently, the need for a 
large number of translations grew. 
When referring to audiovisual products, however, the use of the term “translation” is not 
even so correct. In these cases the most appropriate term is “audiovisual translation” 
(AVT). There are many definitions of audiovisual translation. According to Díaz Cintas, 
“Audiovisual translation refers to the translation of products in which the verbal 
dimension is supplemented by elements in other media” (Díaz Cintas, in Reich 2006).  
Audiovisual translation can also be called ‘screen translation’, ‘film translation’ or 
‘language transfer’. Nevertheless, the most accurate term referring to audiovisual 
products is “audiovisual translation”. As Karamitroglou asserts, “it emphasises the audio-
visual dimension of the communicative mode” (Karamitroglou 2000: 1). 
It is a complex language transfer because, unlike communication through books or 
telephone for example, it uses different codes simultaneously. Therefore, audiovisual
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products are multimedia texts, precisely because they make use of two different channels 
to transmit their message, i.e. the acoustic channel and the visual channel. The former, in 
its verbal and non-verbal form, includes dialogues, music, noises and silence; the latter, 
in its verbal and non-verbal form, includes subtitles, captions and writing that appear 
together with the images (Perego, Taylor 2012: 46). 
It is important at this point to recall the concept of accessibility which is intrinsically 
connected to audiovisual translation. One of the purposes of audiovisual translation is to 
put all users, especially the most vulnerable ones, in a position to make use of the 
translation services that best suit their needs. For deaf and blind people could be very 
difficult, if not impossible, to fully understand a normal film or a TV programme without 
specific textual adaptations. However, thanks to particular translation methods, such as 
intralingual subtitling or voice over, this is actually possible. Intralingual subtitling for 
deaf or hard-of-hearing people, for example, includes the transcription not only of 
dialogues but also of sound effects and paralinguistic elements as they complement the 
visual and the written system. 
As already mentioned above, audiovisual products are multimedia texts, which means 
that they have a complex multicode text whose translation could be problematic and 
implies a more or less radical adaptation process. For this reason this practice has just 
recently assumed a scientific status becoming a branch of Translation Studies. 
A growing interest in this discipline has emerged even in the academic field in response 
to the demands of an ever-expanding market. The first countries that have recognised the 
university status of AVT were Denmark (especially with regard to subtitling, whose 
major exponent is Henrik Gottlieb), France, Belgium and Finland. In Italy too there are 
several university courses and master’s degree courses on AVT (Petillo 2008: 12). 
However, as Petillo points out, audiovisual translation still enjoys a relatively low 
scientific-academic status if compared, in economic terms, to the importance of the 
industry that it feeds on the whole planet (Petillo 2008: 11).
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1.2   AV T types 
According to Gambier (Gambier 2003: 172), the various types of A VT can be classified 
into two groups: 
 
-   Dominant types: interlingual subtitling, dubbing, consecutive interpreting, 
simultaneous interpreting, voice-over, free commentary, simultaneous translation 
and multilingual production. 
 
-   Challenging types: script translation, intralingual subtitling, live (or real time) 
subtitling, surtitling and audio description.  
 
On the basis of the subdivision proposed by Gambier, among the dominant types there 
are the most used techniques for the translation of audiovisual texts. However, although 
the classification is quite recent, it is no longer available to describe faithfully what is 
happening today in the audiovisual sector, which has changed considerably in recent 
years. Thanks to the development of new cutting-edge software and the use of innovative 
translation techniques, some types of A VT considered challenging by Gambier, such as 
intralingual subtitling and audio description, are being widely used today in many 
countries. 
Dubbing and subtitling, as will be reported in the third paragraph, are the two most 
widespread types of linguistic transfer and, therefore, based on Gambier’s classification, 
dominant types. Given their importance and their wide use, a brief description of these 
two techniques will be given below. 
Dubbing is a process which entails  
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 (Luyken, in 
Canepari 2016: 358). 
Subtitling instead, can be defined as  
the translation of the spoken (or written) source text of an audiovisual product into a written 
target text which is added onto the images of the original product, usually at the bottom of 
the screen (Gottlieb, in Karamitroglou 2000: 5).