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

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 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.