Linguistic Adaptations, Humour and Cultural Variations in Subtitling Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Abstract

[eng] Due to technological advancements that have increased the general availability of films, new digital platforms such as Netflix have emerged. Furthermore, the great dominance of the American film industry across the world —Spain included— has emphasised the importance of translation, giving a new boost to the area of study called audiovisual translation. This dissertation uses Jan Pedersen’s translation strategies list (2005) in order to study the subtitles into Spanish from the English original version of the film Inglourious Basterds (2009) by Quentin Tarantino. This analysis seeks to understand whether these strategies have preserved the original meaning of the English version when translated into Spanish, focusing on even more difficult aspects when dealing with translation: humour and cultural references. The dissertation explores the different issues that arise when translating from a language into another, since cultures are different and they perceive a text in a different way. Since this film has already been studied by other scholars —such as Alejandra Sánchez Veiga, who studied the translation for the DVD version of the film—, this dissertation focuses on the subtitles of the version for Netflix, focusing on the strategies used for the translation process, but also presenting the differences and alternative translations of some of the examples, since some humourous and cultural references’ translation proposed by Sánchez can be perceived as archaic. In order to demonstrate the issues and problems that audiovisual translation may create, evidence from the movie will be studied and analysed in detail. The analysis concludes with a reflection regarding which strategy used is more suitable in order to preserve the meaning of the source text when transferred into the target text.