Tangled in Audiovisual Translation: a case study of Romanian film dubbing

Adriana-Georgiana Grijac Tangled in Audiovisual Translation: a case study of Romanian film dubbing 3 Argument Translation has become an essential part in our lives without which it would be impossible to communicate across different cultures. Developed to overcome cultural and linguistic barriers, translation has evolved over the years, going hand in hand with the evolution of society, culture and technology. In fact, with the advent of mass media, and due to globalization, there was an increased translation demand all over the world. Moreover, along with the growth of both television and film industry the need for Audiovisual Translation (AVT) emerged too. Within the field of AVT, Screen translation receives the most attention from scholars, as it refers to the translation of cinema, television, internet and DVD products. (Chiaro “Issues”, 141) This thesis stems from a personal interest in translating films, more precisely in dubbing as a form of screen translation. Dubbing is a particular type of translation, which imposes certain constraints to translators, such as: the limits imposed by visual images, lip synchronization, or the adaptation of cultural elements from one script to another. This implies that the role of the dubbing director is essential, because in addition to creating a corpus of translated dialogues in the target language, as close as possible to the source language, he\she also makes the narrative discourse accessible to an audience that over time becomes increasingly larger. The main objective of this work is to illustrate the intense and complex process that underlies the creation of a Romanian dubbed film. To do so, the first chapter, after Introduction, representing the theoretical framework of the thesis, will briefly describe the field of audiovisual translation, define the notion of dubbing and indicate the constraints which make dubbing a specific type of translation. The second chapter will describe the different stages that constitute the technical process of film dubbing in Romania, drawn up on the basis of direct contact with some practitioners (some significant interviews with dubbing professionals are provided in Annexes). In the final chapter, a contrastive analysis between the original script of the computer animated film Tangled and the Romanian dubbed version O poveste încâlcită will show how common translation issues, such as culture-bound elements and wordplay were dealt with considering the numerous constraints present in audiovisual translation, and dubbing in particular.