Introduction

                                                                                                            
We have already seen how translation is part of our daily lives. This is true of our leisure activities too. For example, Hollywood films are very popular in India. All sorts of people, those who know and do not know English, go to theatres to watch these films. But the American accent that is used in Hollywood movies is difficult to follow for even those who are fluent in English. From a purely commercial angle, it is of immense benefit to the Hollywood producers if their films can be appreciated by a wider audience, for whom these films need to be translated or dubbed into an Indian language. So we have seen blockbusters like Titanic, Jurassic Park, Spiderman etc in Hindi, Tamil, or Telugu run to packed houses for weeks on end. The awkwardness or sometimes downright comical effect of listening to Spiderman in Hindi referring to his aunt May as ‘mausi’ does not deter the avid movie watcher in India.

What is going on here is translation at all levels – interlingual as well as intercultural. While interlingual transfer is possible in the case of translation of a film, the intercultural aspect is more problematic. For example, the language of Spiderman can be translated into Hindi, but the cultural milieu cannot be translated into India. So we have a strange case of translation which is oriented to the target language but not to target culture. The issues associated with this audiovisual translation are different from the ones we encounter in the case of written interlingual translation. What get translated are the dialogues of the film, which constitute only a part of the film as a whole. Like the translation of advertisements, the translation of films is also largely motivated by calculations of profit. Dubbing or subtitling is part of the commercial establishment of the film industry, and can only partly be seen as an art. This would make the translation, very much like that of advertisements, an activity that has to be successful in the commercial sense.

Dubbing and subtitling are the forms of translation that are associated with audiovisual media like films and television. Together they are also called screen translation which, according to Eithne O’Connell, is “currently the preferred term used for the translation of a wide variety of audiovisual texts displayed on one kind of screen or another” (A Companion to Translation Studies, 126).