Correlating trainees' translating performance with the quality of their metacognitive self-evaluation

This paper presents a study of correlations between the performance of trainee translators, according to their teacher’s assessment, and the quality of their self-evaluation, according to their answers to metacognitive questionnaires. Two case-studies of two consecutive editions of a course in general translation from German into Spanish are dealt with. The course involved the use of post-translation metacognitive questionnaires designed to help trainees to evaluate their translating. A selection of the questionnaires (from the strongest and the weakest performances by students for each course edition) is considered. The study focuses on one item in these questionnaires that has to do with identifying translation problems and justifying their solutions. An interpretive analysis of the trainees’ answers for this questionnaire item reveals that the best-performing students were more strategically and translationally aware in self-evaluating their own translating. Our conclusions are based on considering six parameters from the analysis of the trainees’ answers, which are tentatively regarded as indicative of the quality of their self-evaluation

Subtitling wit: the case of "Ridicule"

Subtitled films are often dismissed as unsatisfactory on the grounds that they contain, at best, inaccuracies, ellipses and omissions, or at worst, that they are misleading, distracting and discouraging foreign spectators. More generally, subtitles are often associated with translation loss and untranslatability. This article uses the case of the English version of a successful French period film, Ridicule (Leconte 1996), to raise a number of issues relating to subtitling. Beyond the specific problems encountered in this special type of translation and the various strategies adopted, it considers the common assumptions of the foreign public and critics, and analyses through specific examples to what extent these are founded. The examples chosen focus on style, register, play on word, humour and cultural references

Translating verbal and visual language in The Piano

This paper explores the way in which visual and verbal signs interact with each other in film and how the nature of this interaction impacts on interlingual subtitling and dubbing. The audiovisual text consists of an intricate network of signs from which the viewer will infer meaning. The audiovisual translator needs to consider the different elements involved before deciding on a possible rendering or particular translation strategy over and above the various constraints which operate in subtitling and dubbing. The verbal dialogues are situated within a visual narrative, complemented by nonlinguistic auditory signs such as sound effects and music. Up to what point can we say that visual information in the image shapes the translations? Is it enough to let the image speak for itself, or are there ways in which one strategy could be preferred over another because of other signs in the image