Peat, Nicholas and Unger, Johann and Smith, Birgit (2018) “Is this Bizarro World?” : The adaptation of characterisation and intertextuality in German audiovisual translation. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
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Abstract
This thesis contributes to the scholarly understanding of intertextuality, characterisation and translation theory; building upon earlier analyses of audiovisual translation of genre television (e.g. Bosseaux 2015, Knox and Adamou 2011), my thesis undertakes analyses of interactions between recurring characters in the sixth season of the US television programme, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The first major contribution of this thesis is the construction of a model of textual cues for characterisation specifically for audiovisual media (e.g. film, television), including non- English language media, building on Bosseaux’s (2015), Culpeper’s (2001) and Walker's (2012) models for dubbed television, drama and novels, respectively. The scene-based analysis of these textual cues in the original English, German dubbing and German subtitles allows the viability of my model for characterisation to be assessed with regard to the audiovisual-specific aspects they incorporate; examples include the visual features of a character's milieu (e.g. the furnishings with which characters are seen to surround themselves) or the visual representation of mental processes (e.g. hallucinations to which the viewer is privy), neither of which could be discerned from non-visual scripts or prose narration. The second major contribution of this thesis concerns intertextual references (see e.g. Fairclough 2003, Allen 2011) which, as a form of textual adaptation, are used in the text to create characterisation. As intertextual references are adapted in audiovisual translation (see e.g. Pérez-González 2014), the characterisation provided by those intertextual references is also adapted; these adaptations are the focus of analysis. For the purposes of this analysis, intertextual references are categorised as allusions, quotations, adaptations and co-text (categories chosen to reflect how intertextuality can be removed or introduced via audiovisual translation): these categories serve to help discern how specific forms of intertextuality are adapted in translation. These qualitative, scene-based analyses (Bednarek 2012) explore different ways in which audiovisual translation can adapt characterisation; adaptations via translation are considered in accordance with the specific limitations of dubbing and subtitles, as well as Systemic Functional Grammar (e.g. Halliday 2014) and multimodal codes (e.g. Chaume 2012), to explain salient decisions taken by translators. Through so doing, it is demonstrated that characterisation can be analysed in dubbed and subtitled texts and intertextual references can be analysed in terms of the characterisation they convey, which can be adapted in translation as the intertextuality is adapted. These are the contributions of this thesis to the fields of intertextuality, characterisation and translation.