A ground-breaking study of the roles played by foreign languages in film and television and their relationship to translation. The book covers areas such as subtitling and the homogenising use of English, and asks what are the devices used to represent foreign languages on screen?

Translating Popular Film is a ground-breaking study of the roles played by foreign languages in film and television and their relationship to translation. The book covers areas such as subtitling and the homogenizing use of English, and asks what are the devices used to represent foreign languages on screen?

This highly accessible introduction to translation theory, written by a leading author in the field, uses the genre of film to bring the main themes in translation to life. Through analyzing films as diverse as the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, The Star Wars Trilogies and Lost in Translation, the reader is encouraged to think about both issues and problems of translation as they are played out on the screen and issues of filmic representation through examining the translation dimension of specific films. In highlighting how translation has featured in both mainstream commercial and arthouse films over the years, Cronin shows how translation has been a concern of filmmakers dealing with questions of culture, identity, conflict and representation. This book is a lively and accessible text for translation theory courses and offers a new and largely unexplored approach to topics of identity and representation on screen. Translation Goes to the Movies will be of interest to those on translation studies and film studies courses.

Uncovering the vital role of interpreters, dubbers and subtitlers in global film, Nornes examines the relationships between moving-image media and translation and contends that film was a globalized medium from its beginning and that its transnational traffic has been greatly influenced by interpreters.

This rich collection of articles and essays by film historians, translation scholars, archivists, and curators presents film translation history as an exciting and timely area of research. It builds on the last twenty years of research into the history of dubbing and subtitling, but goes further, by showing how subtitling, dubbing, and other forms of audiovisual translation developed over the first fifty years of the twentieth century. This is the first book-length study, in any language, of the international history of audiovisual translation which includes silent cinema. Its scope covers national contexts both within Europe and beyond. It shows how audiovisual translation practices were closely tied to their commercial, technological and industrial contexts. The Translation of Films, 1900-1950 draws extensively on archival sources and expertise. In doing so it revisits and challenges some of the established narratives around film languages and the coming of sound. For instance, the volume shows how silent films, far from being straightforward to translate, went through a complex process of editing for international distribution. It also closely tracks the ferment of experiments in film translation during the transition to sound from 1927 to 1934 and later, as markets adjusted to the demands of synchronised film. The Translation of Films, 1900-1950 argues for a broader understanding of film translation: far from being limited to language transfer, it encompasses editing, localisation, censorship, paratextual framing, and other factors. It advocates for film translation to be considered as a crucial contribution not only to the worldwide circulation of films, but also to the art of cinema.

Ever since film was brought into China at the end of the nineteenth century, translation has conquered language, ideological and cultural barriers and facilitated the dissemination of films in China. Offering fresh visions and innovative studies on various important issues, including mistranslation, the dubbing of Hong Kong kung fu films, the dubbing of foreign films in China, the subtitling of Chinese dialect films, the subtitling of independent Chinese documentaries, and a vivid personal account of the translation and distribution of Chinese cinemas in France, this book aims to generate international dialogue by presenting diverse approaches to the translation and dissemination of Chinese cinemas. This book builds on previous research and further expands the horizons of the subfield, with the hope that this intervention will suggest new possibilities and territories for the study of the translation of Chinese cinemas. Translated foreign films have become an integral part of Chinese cinemas and translated Chinese films have in turn enriched the concept of world cinema. In many ways, it is a timely publication in the context of the globalization of the film industry - as Chinese films increasingly go global. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas.

Under modernity, time is regarded as linear and measurable by clocks and calendars. Despite the historicity of clock-time itself, the modern concept of time is considered universal and culturally neutral. What Walter Benjamin called “homogeneous, empty time” founds the modern notions of progress and a uniform global present in which the past and other forms of time consciousness are seen as superseded. In Translating Time, Bliss Cua Lim argues that fantastic cinema depicts the coexistence of other modes of being alongside and within the modern present, disclosing multiple “immiscible temporalities” that strain against the modern concept of homogeneous time. In this wide-ranging study—encompassing Asian American video (On Cannibalism), ghost films from the New Cinema movements of Hong Kong and the Philippines (Rouge, Itim, Haplos), Hollywood remakes of Asian horror films (Ju-on, The Grudge, A Tale of Two Sisters) and a Filipino horror film cycle on monstrous viscera suckers (Aswang)—Lim conceptualizes the fantastic as a form of temporal translation. The fantastic translates supernatural agency in secular terms while also exposing an untranslatable remainder, thereby undermining the fantasy of a singular national time and emphasizing shifting temporalities of transnational reception. Lim interweaves scholarship on visuality with postcolonial historiography. She draws on Henri Bergson’s understanding of cinema as both implicated in homogeneous time and central to its critique, as well as on postcolonial thought linking the ideology of progress to imperialist expansion. At stake in this project are more ethical forms of understanding time that refuse to domesticate difference as anachronism. While supernaturalism is often disparaged as a vestige of primitive or superstitious thought, Lim suggests an alternative interpretation of the fantastic as a mode of resistance to the ascendancy of homogeneous time and a starting-point for more ethical temporal imaginings.