Estudio descriptivo y contrastivo de la traducción de elementos culturales en la subtitulación (Catalán-Inglés)

This project explores the treatment of Catalan – as a minority language in the international audiovisual landscape and in the film industry – in its translation into English, the majority language of communication within the audiovisual medium, through film subtitling. For the purpose of analysis, the translation of culture-bound elements was selected as the focal point to examine the behaviour of subtitlers in response to the translation problem arising from the presence of culture-bound elements in the source texts. The corpus for this study comprises fourteen Catalan films by the director Ventura Pons, together with their English-subtitled versions. Ventura Pons is considered one of the most internationally recognised directors of Catalan cinema today and his films are regarded as a reference of the autochthonous culture as well as signifiers of cultural identity. The methodological framework follows a descriptive model based on the theoretical proposals put forward by Toury (1980, 1995). This model applies an inductive method that first analyses the target text and then contrasts it with the source text in order to identify patterns that reveal possible translation norms, as defined and categorised by Toury (1995: 54). To this end, this project investigates the translation techniques and overall strategies used in the rendering of culture-bound elements from the corpus by empirically exploring the connections among the following parameters: preliminary norms, audiovisual constraints, interculturality, film genre, domain and translation techniques. More particularly, through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results, the study aims to reveal symptomatic patterns of translation behaviour and to identify possible translation norms that may have been adopted when rendering the culture-bound elements under study.