Forum: Subtitling
Topic: Help with dissertation please!
Poster: Max Deryagin
Post title: -
[quote]elemon wrote:
Hello to everybody.
I am an Italian student willing to gradutate with a dissertation focused on the problems of dubbing foreign TV series into my language.
I would like to ask you some advice since I am not sure either to pick one TV series and focus on that particular one or to pick examples from different TV series (In this case, how many?).
My original idea was focusing on an English TV series never dubbed before in Italian, but some people are telling me that it could be better to have an Italian version to compare mine with that one.
Also, my teacher doesn't want me to translate the whole TV series, but just some bits of it. The rest of the disseration will be talking about some difficulties of translating humour, cultural differences and maybe some made up expressions or dialects.
If you have some ideas - suggestions related to the TV series or to the books to read it would be really helpful for me.
For now, I have been thinking of Black Adder and Miranda as English TV series, or some more popular ones in the US (ex. According to Jim). For the bibliography I will start by reading The Language of Jokes: Analyzing Verbal Play; Delia Chiario, but I will have to find more books related to the issue.
Thank you very much for you help in advance.
Eleonora [/quote]
Hi Eleonora,
Blackadder would be excellent in your case. It has tons of puns and metaphors, and is a huge pain in the neck to dub. I speak from experience, because I've watched both the original and the Russian dub of the series, and I can tell just how much the Russian translators struggled with it.
Here's an example. Take a look at this bit: [url removed]
Here Blackadder uses a pun: "pointless" means both "meaningless" and "broken, without the point". The Russian translators gave up on this joke, as they couldn't find a way to translate it in a sensible way (or didn't have the time to come up with a decent solution). So, the translators used the omission strategy and just translated is as "meaningless", thus losing the joke and leaving the viewer dumbfounded as to why there's background laughter. Can you find a great way to translate this bit into Italian?
The series bristles with such difficult moments and presents great material for your dissertation.
Topic: Help with dissertation please!
Poster: Max Deryagin
Post title: -
[quote]elemon wrote:
Hello to everybody.
I am an Italian student willing to gradutate with a dissertation focused on the problems of dubbing foreign TV series into my language.
I would like to ask you some advice since I am not sure either to pick one TV series and focus on that particular one or to pick examples from different TV series (In this case, how many?).
My original idea was focusing on an English TV series never dubbed before in Italian, but some people are telling me that it could be better to have an Italian version to compare mine with that one.
Also, my teacher doesn't want me to translate the whole TV series, but just some bits of it. The rest of the disseration will be talking about some difficulties of translating humour, cultural differences and maybe some made up expressions or dialects.
If you have some ideas - suggestions related to the TV series or to the books to read it would be really helpful for me.
For now, I have been thinking of Black Adder and Miranda as English TV series, or some more popular ones in the US (ex. According to Jim). For the bibliography I will start by reading The Language of Jokes: Analyzing Verbal Play; Delia Chiario, but I will have to find more books related to the issue.
Thank you very much for you help in advance.
Eleonora [/quote]
Hi Eleonora,
Blackadder would be excellent in your case. It has tons of puns and metaphors, and is a huge pain in the neck to dub. I speak from experience, because I've watched both the original and the Russian dub of the series, and I can tell just how much the Russian translators struggled with it.
Here's an example. Take a look at this bit: [url removed]
Here Blackadder uses a pun: "pointless" means both "meaningless" and "broken, without the point". The Russian translators gave up on this joke, as they couldn't find a way to translate it in a sensible way (or didn't have the time to come up with a decent solution). So, the translators used the omission strategy and just translated is as "meaningless", thus losing the joke and leaving the viewer dumbfounded as to why there's background laughter. Can you find a great way to translate this bit into Italian?
The series bristles with such difficult moments and presents great material for your dissertation.