8/19/2008

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: a case study for translation studies

Take this interrogation scene from Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, opposing Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) to Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut) and David Laughlin (Bob Balaban).



Now, how does the French dubbed version get away with this scene? I mean, how is the translator going to conceal a translation? Watch this excerpt from the French DVD version of the movie, with the original script as subtitles:


CLOSENC7
Uploaded by sergele1


Yep, they simply cut off some lines, paraphrased or added script material… This scene could be a case study in translation studies, especially since the DVD-version adaptators had to deal with the fact that Truffaut was dead and obviously not available to dub himself, but still, they kept what he recorded back then.

1 comment:

pierre-yves said...

aah, translation, dubbing, subtitles, such a mysterious and many-headed branch of linguistics :) nice post!