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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting ((PTTI))

Abstract

It is natural that a fairly young discipline such as AVT should embrace the cultural turn in translation studies as a vantage standpoint and look at problems of language and culture as closely intertwined. The cultural turn in audiovisual translation has meant going beyond the study of translation patterns normally found in descriptive research (Chaume, An overview of audiovisual translation: Four methodological turns in a mature discipline. Journal of Audiovisual Translation, 1(1), 40–63, 2018). This chapter will offer insights on three loci of culture in translation: cultural references, always a fruitful area of research, but one which contains areas deserving of further investigation; intralinguistic culture clashes, that is those potentially conflicting encounters which involve individuals from different cultures sharing the same language and finally, allusions in film and TV dialogue to what we often understand as ‘culture’ proper, that is high-end or low-brow products of art, literature, music and so on, which constitute a special problem but also a special opportunity for translators.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a detailed overview of cultural references, from the earliest definitions by Finkel (1962) and Vlahov and Florin (1969), please see Ranzato 2016. Among the most recent and most in-depth studies in AVT, see Pedersen (2005 and 2011). Díaz Cintas and Remael (2007: 202–207) also proposed influential and widely quoted taxonomies.

  2. 2.

    Reflections on allusions were first inspired by the work of Ritva Leppihalme (1994, 1997, 2001, 2011).

  3. 3.

    The name of the protagonist was changed to Mike in the Italian version, for no apparent reason other than its being a more familiar name or perhaps easier to pronounce for dubbers.

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Ranzato, I. (2020). The Problem with Culture. In: Bogucki, Ł., Deckert, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42105-2_31

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