Beyond the Sensible: Rethinking Film Translation, Retranslating Asian Film

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

A film does not feel complete until it has crossed international boundaries. Because this almost always involves linguistic frontiers, international cinema is only possible thanks to untold numbers of (mostly) anonymous translators. Film translation is a new and fast-growing subfield of translation studies. Firmly centered in Europe, challenges to its orthodoxies are being issued from Asian scholars and translators. This panel of practitioners brings conventional subtitling’s focus on simple semantic meaning under critique from a variety of perspectives. Markus Nornes presents a rethinking of his influential essay “For an Abusive Subtitling,” establishing a theoretical ground for the subsequent papers. Nornes advocates a “sensuous subtitling”—an approach that pays close attention to the material aspects of language, such as class, dialect, gesture, volume, and heightened language such as obscenity or poetry. Akiyama Tamako presents a fine-grained analysis of her translation for Fengming: A Chinese Memoir, comparing it to the earlier English subtitling and arguing that the peculiar limits of the subtitle present unique opportunities for creative translators. Yamamoto Hiroyuki engages the problematics of dialect. He analyzes the Japanese translation of Chinese Eyes, which deploys multi-colored subtitles to signal shifts between Malay, Thai, English and Chinese. This was a retranslation, as the original 2004 subtitles provided no indication of the complex speech of the characters. Retranslation is the subject of Kerim Yasar’s presentation. He examines the theoretical implications and sociocultural dynamics of the practice in the era of new technologies, intensifying border crossings of texts, and emergent approaches to film translation.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Markus Nornes, University of Michigan

Individual Presentations

• Afterthoughts on “For an Abusive Subtitling” - Markus Nornes, University of Michigan

• The Liberty Coerced by Limitation: Subtitling Independent Chinese Documentary - Tamako Akiyama, Rikkyo University

• Reviving Cultural Diversity through Retranslation: Multi-Colored Subtitles for Multi-Language Malaysian Films - Hiroyuki Yamamoto, Kyoto University

• Messing with the Canon: Japanese Cinema and the Anxiety of Retranslation - Kerim Yasar, Ohio State University