Gender in audiovisual translation: Naturalizing feminine voices in the French Sex and the City

Abstract

This article explores how certain feminine voices are adapted or ‘naturalized’ in audiovisual translation in order to conform to the intended audience’s assumed gender beliefs and values. Using purposefully selected examples from the American series Sex and the City, the author analyses elements pertaining to American feminism and how they are rendered in the French dubbing and subtitles. While the subtitles retain most references, the dubbing reveals a marked tendency to delete, weaken and transform allusions to American feminist culture as well as female achievements in the public sphere and feminist ideology. These findings are discussed in relation to the history, place and representation of women and feminism in France. The case study suggests that integrating a feminist approach in audiovisual translation research could help women’s studies detect the unspoken gender values of the cultures for which audiovisual translation is produced.

Translating feminism in China

“…The beginning of the second decade of the twenty-fi rst century witnessed a boom in feminist translation studies, with at least eighty-eight papers and books published in less than 4 years, more than half of what was published in the last decade. The research in recent years includes such topics as gender and oral (text) translation (Feral 2011, Palmary 2011, Rooyen 2011, female translator and translator-effect (Woods 2011, Jackson 2013), gender and translation (Breen 2011, Hosington 2012, Zoberman 2014, translating poetic texts by women or about women (Weber 2012, Wells 2013, gender in the biblical text translation (Parker 2013), women as translator, translation trainer, and translation scholars (Schaeffner 2013), translation and/or reception of feminism (Reimóndez 2013, Godayol 2014, Yusupova 2014. Studies concerning non-Euro-American languages and cultures have kept appearing, such as Japanese (Clements 2011), Afrikaans (Rooyen 2011), and Chinese (Li Bo 2013).…”

Reflections on the translation of gender in Perfect Blue, an anime film by Kon Satoshi

“…2) The second approach addresses differences between subtitled and dubbed versions of a same product, e.g. in Feral (2011a), and in this article.…”

“…In the first approach, for instance, Bianchi (2008) explains that Buffy herself is dubbed in a manner that she is "tamed and normalized" (191ff) to the stereotypical ideas of Italian female sexuality. In the second approach, Feral (2011a) describes that whilst the French subtitling of Sex and the City shows powerful and successful women, the dubbing seems to place less emphasis on "female education, skills, ambition and success" (399). Finally, in the third approach "both Lewis and Ranzato find that the terminology available in Italian or Spanish for 'queer' ways of being and expressing oneself is either non-existent or weak, and often simply erased and replaced with more conventional language" (von Flotow and Josephy-Hernández, forthcoming 2018).…”

Five things you wanted to know about audiovisual translation research, but were afraid to ask

“…Being a young discipline, AVT and its history are still under-researched with plenty of space to look into archive material (Díaz Cintas, 2018;Gromová & Janecová, 2013;O'Sullivan & Cornu, in press;Zanotti, 2018). More research is also needed in the area of AVT andgender (De Marco, 2012, 2016;Fasoli, Mazzurega, & Sulpizio, 2016;Feral, 2011), multilingualism (Heiss, 2004;Meylaerts, 2013;O'Sullivan, 2011;Remael, 2012;Szarkowska, Żbikowska, & Krejtz, 2013), AVT corpora (Baños, Bruti, & Zanotti, 2013;Prieels, Delaere, Plevoets, & De Sutter, 2015;Reviers, Remael, & Daelemans, 2015) or ideology, manipulation and censorship (Bucaria, 2017;Díaz Cintas, 2012;Dwyer, 2009;Hołobut, 2012;Kruger, 2012;Rashid, 2016;Scandura, 2004;Wang & Zhang, 2016).…”