1997 nonverbal in poyatos-libre

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PATRICK ZABALBEASCOA page 328

understand the choices involved; and finally, identify the exact force of each

factor for each type of translation. Thus, we can build a two-way road that will

enable specific case studies to contribute towards a general theory , while general

theoretical considerations can help towards a better understanding of each case.

This chapter will attempt to describe some of the specific features of audiovisual

translation and account for them within a model based on the variability of the

priorities and restrictions involved in the translating process.

2. Linguistic approaches to translation

The kind of approach expressed in Roman Jakobsons (1959) division of the

general field of translation into three parts has had a considerable influence on the

way translation has been perceived ever since. According to this division,

intralingual translation consists essentially in rewording (or paraphrasing)

something within the same language. Interlingual translation comprises the

rendering of the verbal signs of one language by means of the verbal signs of

another. Intersemiotic translation involves the transference of a message from

one kind of symbolic system to another. Typical examples of this type of

translation are transmutations from a message composed of verbal signs into

morse code or a flag message. Almost unanimously, the interlingual type has been

regarded as translation proper, and hence studies in the field of translation

concentrated on monolingual messages and how they could best be rendered into

different, supposedly monodialectal, languages to make up a 100% verbal message.

Most models of translation are based on this premise. Thus, the terminology of the

discipline includes such terms as the source language and the target language.

The labels source-languageand target-language have been widely used in the

dicipline to refer to texts, cultures, readers, authors, etc.

Such an approach not only seems to exclude texts that are not purely

monolingual, it also implies a view of language that usually only takes verbal signs

into consideration and reveals a confident feeling that there are clear-cut borders

between all languages and internal stability for each one. This has lead the debate

and theorization on translation to focus for a long time almost entirely on the

morphological, syntactic and semantic distributions of lexical items and their

differences from one language to the next. Matters to do with supra-segmental

features, language variation and the combination of verbal and nonverbal elements

were either eliminated by definition or swept under the carpet. Linguistics,

however, gradually broadened its horizons, paying more


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Dubbing and the Nonverbal Dimension of Translation page 329

attention to pragmatics, for example, and developed the areas of sociolinguistics,

discourse analysis and text linguistics. The results of these developments were

later applied to translation studies. Translation was viewed first as something to do

with the structures of languages, then with the functions of languages, and more

recently, with the nature of communication, including the processes of producing

and receiving texts, and, of course, their structures and functions. Discourse

analysts have proved to be particularly interested in the semiotic dimension of

language and authors such as Hatim and Mason (1991) have been instrumental in

applying discourse models to translation. The realization that texts and utterances,

rather than languages, are the objects of translation has helped tremendously in

the development of the field. Furthermore, definitions of language can be made so

as to account for language variation, body language and other forms of nonverbal

communication.

3. Translation studies as a discipline

The fact that translation can be found in so many different communication

situations makes it very difficult to find a definition or a general theory that is

capable of covering and accounting for all translating situations. The alternative,

of course, is to give a narrow definition and eliminate from the field anything that

does not fall squarely within the boundaries of the definition. Some so-called

general statements about translation can only be applied to certain situations or

types of translations. The only way to make them general is to say that other

types of translation are not really translation at all. Such is

often the fate of dubbing and other forms of screen translation.

A lot of people, both audiences and scholars, have dismissed screen

translation as a problem only of synchronization, especially of the words with the

lip movement, although they admit that the problem is indeed a very big one. One

consequence of viewing the matter too simplistically is that synchronization is

regarded as being a unique feature of this type of translating. Another one is that

any other problems that there might be are not easily seen and not always taken

into account. Both of these consequences have for a long time hampered the

improvement of our knowledge of both screen translation and translation in

general.

However, synchronization is a requirement that is actually quite closely

related to very traditional methods of translation, such as one-to-one equivalence

and interlinear translation, which also demand a synchronization of sorts. An


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PATRICK ZABALBEASCOA page 330

apparent requirement for the translation of the commands of certain computer

software seems to be that the translated lexical items that correspond to each

command begin with the same letter as the original version, so that the same key

can be pressed to activate the command in both the original and the foreign

version. This sometimes leads to results that are just as bizarre as some phrases in

dubbed films, which are often apparently a result of the synchronization

requirement. We could even say that when translating comics, fitting foreign

words into the same bubbles is a sort of spacial synchronization.

Some scholars refer to the translation of certain types of texts (e.g. comics,

films) as constrained translation. This should be used to imply that there is

anything that can properly be called unconstrained translation. Dubbing is not

necessarily more constrained than other forms of translation. It is rather that

different forms of translation are constrained in different ways and by differentfactors.

Relatively recently (e.g. Delabastita 1989), more systematic approaches to

screen translation and other types of translation have contributed towards

providing less simplistic accounts. Such approaches aim at discovering all the

factors that play a role in a given translation and attempt to apply models of

analysis that can help to account for as many eventualities as possible (e.g. norm-

based theory as developed by Toury 1995). In the case of dubbing, a large

number of very different factors come into play, such as professional, socio-

cultural and technical ones, as well as language and communication factors, which

include their nonverbal dimension.The premises used here are: (1) the basic input and output of translation are

texts; (2) a film, or television production, as a text, is an audiovisual text; (3) a text is

a communicative occurrence which meets seven standards of textuality (de

Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981: 3), namely, cohesion, coherence, intentionality,

acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality. It is also necessary to

point out that there are almost as many definitions of translation as there are

authors. For me, a translation is a text that fulfills three basic conditions. (1) It

entails the previous existence of another text, usually called the source text (ST).

(2) There is a relationship of equivalence at one or more levels between the ST and

the translation (TT), i.e. the two texts are regarded as equivalent, or even the same,in some way. By virtue of the relationship of equivalence, a TT can be

said to be a version of the ST. (3) There is a need and a purpose for the TT; in

other words, there is a reason why a version of an ST is regarded as necessary and

useful, or desirable, in a given context. One obvious need for translating a written

text appears when one or more of its intended readers do not understand


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Dubbing and the nonverbal dimension of translation page 331

the languageit is in (languageis meant in its broadest sense, meaning any human

form of communication, and any variety of any language). However, this is not the

only possible reason. A knowledge of the language of a text is not always enough

to be able to make sense of it, thus it is possible to justify the production of a more

accessible (so-called intralingual) version. Furthermore, language difference is

not usually a sufficient reason, i.e. texts are not translated into foreign languages

without some other justification, e.g. the ST is considered to be relevant to the TT

users in some way.

Equivalence, if it is going to be used as a concept in translation studies and

models, cannot have an absolute, context -free value. Translational equivalence can

best be defined as the result of an attempt to preserve or render a certain

item or aspect of the ST in the TT. When there is a complete success in preserving

a certain aspect in its entirety we may speak of sameness. Equivalence, however,is a concept that admits that we often fall short of sameness in our renderings. It is

a variable in that translators are not always pursuing the same kind (or levels) of

equivalence. Traditional definitions and accounts of equivalence, where it is

given a constant value, lead to a prescriptive account of the product of translation.

4. The priorities and restrictions of translation

Let us consider translation as a matter of priorities and restrictions, where the

concept of priorities is used as a means of expressing the intended goals for a

given translation task and the restrictions are the obstacles and problems that help

to justify ones choice of priorities as well as the solutions adopted in the

translation.

Establishing Priorities

We will suppose that there is, in principle, a completely open number of

potential priorities and restrictions for the whole body of existing and future

translations. We will also assume that there do not necessarily have to be any

universal priorities, i.e. individual priorities that are present in every translation

task. Priorities and restrictions will have to be fixed anew for each task, although

this may not always be as time-consuming as it sounds. A set of priorities for a

given translation might be visualised on a vertical scale of importance, ranging

from a very important top priority all the way down to very minor priorities. This

makes it possible to monitor the consistency with which solutions respond

to higher order priorities first and foremost, and lower order priorities only in


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Patrick Zabalbeascoa page 332

those cases when all of the more important priorities have been satisfied first.

Thus, a priority is also a restriction for all of the priorities that are below it. So,

how does one deal, for instance, with stylistic equivalence in translation? The

first thing one needs to know is the nature of the scale of priorities for the task

at hand, and more precisely, what priorities are above stylistic equivalence and

which ones are below it (and, of course, what is meant by stylistic equi-valence).

The position of these or any other priorities on the hierarchical scale may be

different for the ST and the TT.

How far can the utterance of the verbal elements of the jokes in a dubbed film

deviate from perfect lip synchronization, accuracy of information given and other

such considerations in pursuit of (the priority of finding) the funniest solutions? It

would seem that there is often a need to strike a balance between

a search for comic effect by making the translated jokes as funny as possible, onthe one hand, and, on the other, finding solutions that will not put the viewer off

because there is an excessive lack of synchronization; or because the plot, the

structure and the coherence of the text are weakened for the sake of witty

one-liners. This may also lead to the loss of other potential sources of humour

such as dramatic irony.

An important question is whether strict word-lip synchronization is a

universal requirement or not. It has been reported (e.g. Rowe 1960) that there is

a variable degree of tolerance for less-than-perfect synchronization from one

audience to another. A lack of tolerance of this nature can be regarded as a

restriction. At this point it is possible to deduce that the greater thetolerance the weaker the force of the need for perfect synchronization, and

consequently, the wider the range of possible solutions. Restrictions, including the

synchrony requirement and language differences between ST and TT, have

varying degrees of force and can even be practically cancelled out at certain points

of a given text.

The concept of equivalence

Equivalence can be seen as a means of describing the priorities for a translation.

Each priority can be said to have one of the following properties: equivalence,

non-equivalence, or equivalence not regarded. Equivalence is a variable and the

potential levels of equivalence for a translation correspond to those priorities

which equivalence can be associated to. It is also variable in degree if we accept

that its aims range from absolute identity to slight resemblance.

For example, producing comedy by translating a comedy entails that

intended comic effect is: (a) very high on the scale of importance; (b) an

equivalence priority, close to absolute identity. The word intended as used


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above means that equivalence is a characteristic of an intention to be funny

regardless of the final outcome in either the ST or the TT. What matters in this case

is that the ST is seen as wanting to be funny and that is why the translator

is aiming for funniness, too.

Of course, this is not to say that comedy has to be translated as comedy at

all times. If a translator, or his/her client wished to eliminate this aspect from the

translation, for whatever reason, we might say that avoid comic effect is a non-

equivalence priority for the TT of a humorous ST. This particular possibility

does not seem very likely for dubbing TV comedy into foreign languages.

However, there are cases when STs of a serious nature have been turned into

comic parody or farce by means of dubbing.

If a priority such as politically correct language and pictures were included

as a norm or rule in all TV productions for country X, then it would have to appearin that countrys versions of foreign TV programmes, regardless of its importance

in the STs. This would be an example of equivalence not regarded; even so, it will

sometimes be important to know whether the result happens to produce

equivalence or non-equivalence. In principle, a TT may have any number of non-

equivalence priorities, but it must also reflect the equivalence priorities (variable

from case to case) that can reasonably justify its existence as

a version of the ST. From this angle, a TT can be judged separately on the

following aspects: (a) how easily one can identify a clear set of priorities, i.e. its

internal coherence; (b) how well each priority was met by the solutions provided;

(c) to what extent the choice of priorities was plausible, and in tune with any othercriteria it could be judged by.

The dynamics of restrictions

Operative restrictions are often a matter of degree (e.g. the ST TT language

gap or the weaknesses of the ST), so we may speak of the force of a restriction.

The absence of a restriction during the translating process cancels out that

restriction as a factor that must be taken into consideration, which brings about a

series of favourable circumstances to be exploited by the translator. I call this

phenomenon restrictions reversed. Here are seven examples of such

circumstances.

1. A TT with only a small number of priorities, e.g. when translating road signs

for drivers, the single most importnt priority is that they be user-friendly; and

in the case of summary translation the major priorities are usually limited to

finding ways of conveying the most relevant aspects the ST in a clear, brief

manner.


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2. Specific characteristics of the ST, or certain aspects of it, either point very

clearly to the most adequate kind of solution, or provide the translator with a

greater degree of choice; e.g. STs with considerable redundancy or little

ambiguity regarding meaning and intention. In the case of dubbing there are

usually many nonverbal cues that help to interpret the words and the text

as a whole.

3. A wide range of available priority-oriented tactics or solutions. Restrictions

on availability of this sort include: lack of awareness; the presence of a series

of norms that discourage or prohibit certain types of solutions; finally,

solutions that depend on a certain level of technology will not be possible

when the technical means are not available. In the future we may see the

picture of audiovisual texts manipulated almost as much as the sound, when

new technology makes that possible and convention changes.

4. Very small differences in some aspects of pairs of languages, cultural

contexts, social groups, historical periods. The related restrictions are

proportionally reduced.

5. The translator may be the TT initiator, the ST author or have easy access

to either of them, or feel intense empathy towards the ST writer. On the other

hand, the translator may have an excellent knowledge of the TTs intended

readers, what they react to, why and how, their likes and dislikes, their

background knowledge or degree of expertise.

6. Adequate translator(s), i.e. the task is done by one or more people with the

necessary degree of: (a) training, experience and the necessary ability to draw

from it; (b) general and specialized knowledge, and, of course, an awareness

of what translating involves; (c) the necessary skills to put all of this

knowledge into practice for the task at hand.

7. Plenty of time, means, and incentives, and even team work, especially for

dubbing. This is often a matter of money, patience and / or willpower.

The nature of translation is the result of the human need to communicate, and

similarities in communication strategies just as much as similar linguistic structures.The striking similarities in the structures of many languages has probably

obscured this fact for a long time. In translation, we could regard differences

between languages as expected restrictions, and any similarity between them as a

lucky instance where the expected restriction is not operative, it is a reversed

restriction. Any linguistic or cultural similarities are to be


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in many different ways with the picture. Some images and some of the nonverbal

sounds are directly related to the words uttered and others are not. Timing of

delivery is an important factor in dubbing, both for lip movement and for certain

situations that call for special responses with a special timing, e.g. a joke, or a

dramatic climactic moment.

Translating comedy for the television: priorities and restrictions

A possible set of priorities for translating television situation comedy could be

the following: do well in popularity ratings, be funny, aim for immediate

response (i.e. be entertaining and elicit laughter), integrate the words of the

translation with the other constituent parts of the audiovisual text (verbal and

nonverbal units including verbal and nonverbal jokes), use language andstructures (verbal and nonverbal elements) appropriate to the channel of

communication. In the case of television series a specific priority is probably to

create some sort of addiction or faithful following.

Among the most salient restrictive factors involved in translating television

programs are the following aspects: political restrictions and management policies;

speed and depth of assimilation by the audience; associations and allusions

between one program and another, either implicit or explicit, this being part of the

required shared knowledge of the viewers; market economy and popularity

ratings; advertising, either in the form of interruptions or incorporated into the

program (sponsorship).Recurrent restrictions in translating television comedy are: differences in

shared background knowledge of the two audiences, differences in moral values,

cultural values, habits and traditions, differences in traditional joke-themes, the

translators professional context, timing and lip-synchronization, synchronization

of verbal and nonverbal signs, humour that depends on features of the source

language, the visualization of metaphor and other similar aspects

of the visual support of the text that are not allowed to be manipulated.

It is true for most types of translation that there is no stability in the length or

nature of the segment of text that is translated each time. Even if the length

of the pieces of text to be translated were constant they could not be interpreted

independently from their context. However, it might be an interesting exercise,

in order to better describe the specific nature of translating for dubbed versions, to

outline the units or chunks of text that are frequently dealt with in dubbing

television comedy series. The following units could be regarded: lip movement;

utterance (relevant when either the speaker is in clear view at a reasonably close

distance or timing of other sounds is important); pause (the pause may be

reproduced or may have to be compensated for or may have to be used to


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compensate for something else); exchange (a group of utterances, e.g. a take);

a scene or sequence (as defined by the script or director of the original); chapter

(e.g. a chapter of Dallasor The Black Adder); a whole series (The Black Adder) or

an entire serial (Dallas).

6. Translating tactics and solutions

Each part or aspect of a translation can be perceived as the outcome of a process

of choosing one of various possible solutions in the light of all the operative

factors of the moment. The justification for the chosen solution (and for the

resulting TT as a whole) can be expressed in terms of the hierarchical structure

of the priorities along with the other context -sensitive restrictions that were taken

into account.

Newmark (1982: 30) proposes a list of translation procedures (i.e. tactics or

types of solutions) that has three basic premises. These can be put to the test

by what dubbing shows us, especially when the three are taken together. In the

first place, Newmarks procedures are based almost exclusively on lexical

correspondences; secondly, the reader is given the impression that the list is

closed and complete; thirdly, all translation procedures are said to be either

mandatory or optional. The implication is that the degree of choice or imposition

depends entirely on lexical and morphosyntactic correspondences between the

language of the ST and that of the TT. A brief response to this would be that in the

case of dubbing, (1) there are many nonverbal items (e.g. iconic symbols, gestures

and intonation patterns) that demand attention, and therefore it would seem

reasonable to look into the procedures that have been or could be used in

those cases; (2) a closed list of procedures such as the one Newmark proposes is

certainly not a taxonomy and many solutions can belong to more

than one class, so it would seem less prescriptive to consider any such list

completely open to new discoveries and additions, or even a complete rearrange-

ment; (3) the precise conditions under which a given procedure can be said to

be mandatory cannot be predicted by any theoretical model, however a number

of solutions or tactics can be recommended or illustrated by single-purpose

stylesheets. The theory might, at most, want to suggest hypothetical solutions for

consideration by translators or others involved in translation assignments in some

way or other.

It might be true to say that, in translation, the end justifies the means, so it is

unfortunate when the means are not a clear reflection of the end that is


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pursued. Depending on the specific characteristics of the translation assignment, a

translator may resort to a variable range of priority-oriented tactics, or solutions.

We could speak firstly of textual tactics as making use of either discursal or

paradiscursal solutions. Discursal solutions are those items of the TT that are

inserted in the main body and discourse of the text. Paradiscursal solutions are

part of the text (especially the physical dimension of the text) but somehow

independent from the main body and discourse of the text; e.g. footnotes,

glossaries, appendices, forewords, illustrations. Secondly, paratextual tactics

would, for instance, involve the use by the translator of notes or directions on how

the words are to be delivered by the dubbing actor for the words to be interpreted

as intended by the translator; these notes would not be meant to be within the

reach of the TT user. On a different level, solutions can fall into one

of the following three categories: (1) purely verbal, e.g. accounting for ST words orword groups by adding, substituting or deleting words in the TT; by paraphrasing,

or defining; by increasing verbal redundancy, etc.; (2) purely non-verbal: e.g.

adding, changing or deleting nonverbal signs in the form of pictures, colours,

gestures, mimicry, sounds, etc.; (3) verbal - nonverbal compensation, whereby an

ST word or word group along with its textual value is accounted for entirely or

partly in the TT by one or more nonverbal elements, or vice versa,

e.g. the potential meaningfulness of certain kinds of voices or intonations.

7. The semiotic and nonverbal dimension of translating

One thing that dubbing makes us more aware of is that no text can be made entirely

of verbal signs because these signs always need some sort of physical support,

and, as there is usually a choice as to which physical support a text is going to

have and what vehicle is going to be used to transport a text from its sender(s) to

its user(s), that is, its mode of discourse and channel of communica-tion. Both the

physical support and the means of communication are potentially meaningful and

can act as nonverbal signs. Thus, we often feel the need to interpret, for example,

exactly why some letters on a page are larger than others, or why some articles in a

newspaper are illustrated and others are not; or why different people or groups use

different intonation patterns or gestures. Body language, facial expressions,

hesitations and eye contact are factors that interpreters have to take into account

while trying to render a speakers intended message. They are also factors that

have a role to play in film translation. What does one do, for example, when the

words in a novel one is translating were


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subtitling may not alter the picture of a film or freeze a frame for a split second;

audiovisual texts for translation can only be manipulated or translated in their

verbal components.

There are two further considerations to take into account. The first is

language variation within a given text. It is true that some texts include only one

variety of a single language, but there are many texts, especially, in literature, in

films and on television, where many different varieties of a language (idiolects,

dialects, sociolects, etc.) are included. There are also texts that have verbal

elements pertaining to more than one language. The second consideration is the

semiotic value of some of the verbal elements themselves, as shown in Hatim

and Mason (1990), for example.

8. Conclusion

From what has been presented in this chapter, I can now propose that the

intralingual-interlingual distinction be superseded by the notion that both STs and

TTs can manifest variable degrees of monolinguality and membership to a single

genre and a single type of discourse. Thus, interlingual translation (seen

as a process whereby a monolingual ST which is prototypical of a given type of

discourse and genre is rendered into a TT with same characteristics, except

for a change of language) is only one type of translation, or rather it is on one

end of a cline ranging from monolingual and monodiscursive prototypicality to

hybrid multilingual or multidialectal texts. Instead of interlingualintersemiotic

distinction it seems more accurate to regard texts as having varying proportions of

linguistic and verbal elements and nonlinguistic or nonverbal signs.

In this light, all translations are the result of semiotic processes, where

nonlinguistic (and/or nonverbal / suprasegmental / etc.) signs are more important

in some translations than in others.

Future attempts to give accounts of translation techniques or solutions

might wish to include nonverbal compensatory tactics which to date have not been

paid sufficient attention and hence have not been satisfactorily described. Classes

or accounts of solutions would also have to be accompanied by explanations as to

whether they are hypothetical and illustrative of theoretical possibilities, or

whether they are mandatory (or optional or forbidden) for certain assignments, for

example, as they would appear in a single-purpose in-house stylebook.


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1997 nonverbal in poyatos-libre

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