Gemma Martinez-Garrido, Language Co-ordinator in the Department of Hispanic Studies, has just been awarded her doctorate for her thesis ‘Estudio descriptivo y contrastivo de la traducción de elementos culturales en la subtitulación (catalán – ingles)’ – [‘A Descriptive and Contrastive Study of the Translation of Culture-Bound Elements in Film Subtitling (Catalan-English)’].
Her thesis explored the treatment of Catalan, a minority language in the international audio-visual landscape and in the film industry, in its translation into English, the majority language of communication within the audio-visual medium, through film subtitling. In order to identify the way Catalan is treated in this media context and the features of translation practices developed in the rendering of these films, the study analysed the translation of culture-bound elements found in Catalan films. 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 comprised 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.
Our congratulations to Dr Martinez-Garrido.
For more details of research programmes in Hispanic Studies, please see the page: http://www.kent.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/72/hispanic-studies