Song Translation In Film

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When dealing with song translation in dubbed films, the translator should take into account visual-nonverbal aspects of a film. Chaume (2004, 40) lists three main cinematographic conventions that fall under the umbrella of synchrony: • lip-sync; • isochrony; • kinesic synchrony. Moreover, Pilar Orero adds action synchrony. Consequently, Chaume (2012, 75) notes that the importance of visual synchrony depends on the film genre: If the function of the translation is to convey emotions without sounding foreign or strange, and the viewer is to experience the events taking place one the screen, then the role of synchronization is certainly much more relevant. He generally distinguishes three genres that have an expressive function: cartoons, television…show more content…
However, there is no consensus about the importance of lip-sync. Some scholars (Doane 1980, 34; Fodor 1976, 10; Chaume 2004, 35) claim that it plays a dominant role in dubbing, whereas others (Jüngst 2010, 71; Herbst 1994, 32) assert that its importance is overestimated. For instance, Herbst (1994, 44-45) notes that it may be useful to take the sounds into consideration during the process of translation, especially thinking of lip synchrony. However, the translation should not be based only on the sounds that can be potentially problematic but rather on those sounds which are actually articulated with conspicuous lip…show more content…
when spoken, the translated dialogue must be exactly the same length as the time the screen actor or actress has his/her mouth open to utter the ST dialogue exchanges (2012, 72). In this respect, the quality of the target text depends more on the actor’s rather than translator’s skills. According to Chaume (2012, 72), the rough translation done by the translator “does not fit the screen character’s mouth movements.” Consequently, the task of amplification and reduction is being performed by the dialogue writer. Chaume (2012, 73) suggests three techniques, which help to overcome the problems, which may occur while expanding and reducing text: • Amplification of the target text (repetition, gloss, periphrasis, anacoluthon, paraphrase, (longer) synonyms, antonyms, hyperonyms, general terms, and hyponyms or words or phrases whose semantic range is included within that of another word). • In the case of reduction, ellipsis of performative verbs, modal verbs, interjections, markers of the phatic function, expressions just performing socials functions, vocatives, surnames and proper names; omission of redundancies with the images; use of deictic instead of nouns and phrases, of all-purposes words like “thing” or “stuff”, of (shorter) synonyms, antonyms, hyperonyms, hyponyms, metaphors, and

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