FILM TRANSLATION OF LITERARY CLASSICS

Film Translation of Literary Classics

Film Translation of Literary Classics

Introduction

From its beginnings until the present time, the appeal of film translations has been immediate and wide. Vorkapich is right, I think, to remark that "there are extremely few motion pictures that may be cited as instances of creative use of the medium, and from these only fragments and short passages may be compared to the best achievements of other arts." (Bazin, 1967)Those films in which new technological advances and skills were first exhibited are, to be sure, called classical, but the history of the film translations is of too short a duration to justify that designation. Also, classical works out last their times, while so-called film translations classics are terribly dated.

The last decade has witnessed a massive growth in the creation and use of corpora, which have arguably become the necessary hallmark of all scientific linguistic analysis. Electronic corpora nowadays provide the basis for empirical research in translation-based studies, with positive repercussions which have long been discussed in the literature from a theoretical, practical and pedagogic point of view (Baker, 1995; Aston, 2001; Zorzi, 2001; Zanettin, 2001; Ulrych, 2001)

While the potential usefulness of corpora for various fields of translation - e.g. technical, scientific, literary, legal - has been extensively investigated in recent years, multimedia translation scholars have not yet adequately focussed their attention on corpus linguistics tools and methods. The only experience in this direction, to our knowledge, comes from systemic-functional linguistics, and in particular, multimodal analysis theory (Thibault, 2000; Baldry & Thibault, 2001; Taylor, 2003; Taylor, 2004). The investigation of multimodality in 'film texts' has provided the basis for developing a web-based system,1 whose main aim is "the study of the synchronisation between the meaning-making resources deployed in these texts" (Baldry, 2004). Although this application offers an empirical basis for comprehensive description and theoretical analysis of the different semiotic modalities involved in multimedia texts, in its current form it does not allow contrastive study of multimedia products in general, and films in particular. As such, audiovisual translation has until now mainly relied upon the contribution of individual scholars, most of whom have adopted a case-study approach (Gambier & Gottlieb, 2001).

In 2003, in response to the need for more empirical studies, a research group on film translation at the University of Bologna's Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in Translation, Languages and Cultures (SITLeC), made up of Christine Heiss, Marcello Soffritti and Cristina Valentini set out to design a textual and audiovisual database for the collection and study of film translation data. This corpus, called Forlixt 1 (Forlì Corpus of Screen Translation), is part of a more general ongoing project that involves the study of other AVT topics and modalities, such as interlingual and intralingual subtitling and quality of dubbed products (Rundle, 2000; Chiaro, 2004; Antonini & Chiaro, 2005 and forthcoming).

Film Translation of Literary Classics

This thesis develops an analyses on film adaptations, more specifically William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, concentrating on the two most popular films (in terms of ...