Charlotte Bosseaux: Translating Spike
The Importance of Being British
Location: Research Beehive, 2.20
Time/Date: 5th May 2011, 16:00 - 17:00
Now online: The ReCap of the lecture.
The Importance of Being British: Translating Spike.
Dr Charlotte Bosseaux (Edinburgh) will talk about subtitling and translation, looking at the example of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer has enjoyed a worldwide success and is still broadcast on French cable TV. The series is being studied by academics from various backgrounds, such as Philosophy and Film Studies and has become a cult TV series. Aspects of Buffy which have been praised in the literature are the construction of ‘believable’ characters and the use of creative language, the ‘Buffyspeak’ or ‘Slayerspeak’, characterised by neologisms, humour, and slang. Another element of the ‘Buffyspeak’ worth investigating in translation is the use of British English as opposed to American English since the characterisation of Rupert Giles and Spike, the main two British male characters, is primarily based on their accent, the specific vocabulary that they use and their cultural difference. In French, there are two translated versions of Buffy, one dubbed, the other subtitled.
Performance is historically and culturally bound (Dyer 1998). Audiences worldwide can therefore be expected to interpret a performance according to their own specific historical and cultural background. For that reason, it seems relevant to wonder what happens to performance in translation, and particularly in dubbing since the original voice of actors is replaced.
This paper will investigate the character Spike in the original and French translated versions of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It will seek to find out how elements of characterisation, related particularly to performance and voice, are transposed in the French versions. The analysis will consider the audiovisual material as a complex semiotic product. I will perform an attentive film analysis of scenes investigating mise-en-scène, cinematography and sound taking into consideration Spike’s physical expressions and gestures, the tone of his voice and his position within the plot. This visual analysis will also be combined with a linguistic analysis, relying on Systemic Functional Grammar, and incorporating elements such as modality and transitivity. This analysis purports to highlight the usefulness of a combination of number of approaches leading to a multimodal analysis of verbal and non-verbal elements to examine audiovisual material in translation. The combination of linguistic and filmic analysis is ultimately carried out to see how meaning as a whole is transferred in the French versions, and how Spike ‘sound’ in French.
Academic biography
Dr Charlotte Bosseaux is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the way characterisation is dealt with in translation. She first examined literary texts, particularly Virginia Woolf, and is the author of How Does it Feel? Point of View in Translation (Rodopi 2007) which presents a method to investigate point of view in translation using corpus-based tools. She has now turned her attention to audiovisual texts and has published articles on characterisation in the American television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its dubbed and subtitled French versions (2008 and 2008a). She is currently working on a monograph on this topic (Peter Lang, forthcoming) in which she develops a method to analyse systematically characterisation using a multimodal analysis of verbal and non-verbal elements such as voice characteristics, shot composition and vocabulary choices. Recently, she has also worked on song translation (forthcoming 2012, 2011 and 2008).
Selected Bibliography
- Forthcoming (2013). Characterisation in Audiovisual Translation, Oxford: Peter Lang.
-Forthcoming (2012) 'Some Like it Dubbed. Translating Marilyn Monroe', Music, Text and Translation, (ed. Helen Julia Minors), Continuum Books.
- Forthcoming (2011). ‘The Translation of Song’, Handbook in Translation Studies (eds. Kirsten Malmkjær and Kevin Windle), Oxford University Press.
- 2008a. ‘Translating Britishness in the French versions of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis Literaris. Universitat de València : 85-103.
- 2008. ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Characterization in the Musical Episode of the TV Series’, Special issue of The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication 14(2): 343-72.
- 2007. How does it Feel? Point of View in Translation, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Published: 2nd December 2010