Babel - Volume 56, Issue 2, 2010

This article aims to describe how written translations of audiovisual products change along the dubbing process until they reach the audience, focusing mainly on the synchronisation stage. The corpus is made up of the first reel of the Catalan and Spanish translations of three different films released in 2006 (Casino Royale, Good night, and good luck, and The Da Vinci Code).After a brief summary of the dubbing process and a short overview of the approaches to synchronisation found in the literature, the specific strategies found in a bottom-up analysis are highlighted, offering both a wide analysis of the general changes throughout the process and a closer analysis of the specific changes that occur in the synchronisation stage. A comparison of the strategies found in Catalan and Spanish is also included in order to assess whether different languages result in different strategies.

The propensity of the English language to absorb native nuances by the African writers should be seen as a worthwhile stylistic device, despite the position of English language. Its adaptability to natural flavours should therefore be aimed at the writers’ intention to reach a wider audience. This also means that the attempt by writers to decolorize through literature the polluted African culture god through the use of appropriate notions and local nuances. The technique has, however, been to put on record traditional ways of life, the peoples’ customs, communal activities such as festivals, ceremonies, rituals, myths, folktales, proverbs, music, dance, songs, etc. in order to remind the African reader about the importance of these crucial aspects of the tradition in addition to the appropriation of language use.Hence most African writings can be said to have their foundations in the cultural heritage of their various groups. through the use of what one may call technically implanted African English, African coinages, direct translation, proverbs, local idioms transfers of mother tongues, local insertions/ect. Hence it is not enough to use the sociological and residual approaches to literature. The formalist and pragmatic approaches should also be considered paramount in the writing of African literature. For the choice of diction, narrative technique and the entire pragma-aesthetic implications of the African man’s speech is important to the reader of African literature, if he is to understand the theme

In most spiritual gatherings in Southwest Nigeria, as observed today, preaching is in English or in Yoruba and then interpreted in Yoruba or English. English is an official language in Nigeria and Yoruba is the local language in most of the Southwest of the country. Most people are to some extent bilingual.The objective of this study is to evaluate the quality of the interpretation carried out in those spiritual gatherings. Questionnaires were administered. Data were collated and analyzed. A total of 39 respondents (78%) were satisfied with the output of the interpretation from English to Yoruba while only 48% were satisfied with the interpretation from Yoruba to English. The study concludes that interpretation from English to Yoruba is being handled better and more training be given to those interpreting from Yoruba to English.

Although fuzziness is one of the innate characteristics of language, shared by both Chinese and English, there do exist apparent differentiations between them as far as their roles in aesthetic-effect-generating, representation mode, application field suitability and aesthetic impact are concerned, which has remained a great challenge and regret in either English to Chinese (E–C) or Chinese to English (C–E) translation, particularly in the latter. It’s no exaggeration to say that translation is a profession with no lack of regret and translators are professional regret-tasters. The most impressive regret in C–E translation might lie in the fact that the talent and capability of the translators is painfully restricted in reproducing and conveying the aesthetic effect of Chinese fuzzy expressions.As an artistically conceived language, Chinese invites macro-induction in terms of linguistic features while English, being logic-oriented, analysis-based and hypotaxis-dependent, is largely ignorant of what is called macro-induction. Hence abundant aesthetic genius of Chinese fuzzy expressions can hardly find its way into the English version. It can be said that generally the process of C–E translation is one of complementing continuously “meaning blank”, of changing “indeterminacy of meaning” into “determinacy of meaning”, with the E–C translation as the opposite. Many language problems in communication are essentially closely related to nationality psychologic archetype complex, which may be a significant try in translation study.

Translation is to reproduce the meaning and style of a source language text in a target language text in consideration of the cultural differences. Because of dramatic differences between the cultures, translators have to sacrifice something, such as time, religious connotation, and the wording of the original poem to obtain its aesthetic value and its original beauty. In this paper the author examines the poetry translation focusing on the basic concepts of cultural translation and the difficulties of Chinese poetry translation, and special attentions are paid on losses and the strategies in the translation. Beginning from the basic concepts of cultural translation, the paper expounds the essence of the cultural translation in order to lay a sound foundation for the following analysis of the poetry translation. In Part 2, the paper points out the difficulties of Chinese poetry translation that arise from the differences between Chinese and English cultures .Part 3 is a tentative analysis of the losses in the English translation of Chinese poetry and categorizes the losses into four groups:the loss of time;the loss of religious connotation ;the loss in wording; the loss of allusion. To address the losses, the author proposes several strategies such as free translation , transfer of allusion and annotation.