Linguistic Minorities and Audiovisual Translation George Jones Dubbing and subtitling are particularly key issues for minority language broadcasters for a number of reasons, as well as also being, at times, problematic, in spite of their potential benefits. I will examine chiefly, in what follows, the way in which these devices are used on two minority channels, namely the Welsh channel S4C and the Basque one ETB-1. I will then go on to look at the cultural implications of language transfer and the issue of audiovisual translation in cinema. Wales The function of dubbing and subtitling in many countries is to bring the outside world in, making available productions from around the globe in the home language. This can be advantageous in the case of minority languages, because it is possible, where finance is tight and trained audiovisual professionals in short supply, to provide a skeleton service with news and comparatively inexpensive productions and fill the rest of a schedule with dubbed material from elsewhere. English language productions from America can be translated into, for example, Catalan and a slot can be filled at relatively low cost. This choice is, however, not available to the same degree to a Welsh language broadcaster. Films or programmes made in English will already have been seen in the original by a Welsh audience and translation would be pointless. It is, of course, true that there are productions in other languages which might be used and to some extent this is done. Welsh broadcasters have to negotiate, however, with the British prejudice against audiovisual production dubbed or subtitled from, say, French or Spanish, so even then it is not a simple matter. Attempts are being made, however, by S4C, to use material from around the world in children s programming since, it is hoped, this audience will not yet have been so thoroughly conditioned in the prejudice against dubbed or subtitled material. However, the primary function of subtitling on S4C is a different one, namely that of translating the channel for the Welsh nation itself. S4C broadcasts on two channels, one analogue and one digital. The analogue channel was established in 1982 and now broadcasts approximately 33 hours per week of Welsh, mainly at peak viewing hours, the rest of its schedule being made up of English language programmes from the UK fourth channel. The digital channel, established subsequent to the broadcasting act of 1996, shows the same programmes as the analogue at the same times (a legal obligation) as well as additional material, making a total of 12 hours per day in Welsh only. The Welsh audience is complex. Only about 20% of the Welsh population are able to speak the language. Subtitling in English is used chiefly as a means of offering an opportunity for the channel to significantly increase its audience and to attempt to draw the non-welsh-speaking population in to participate in Welsh language culture. Many households in Wales are linguistically mixed, often as a result of children undergoing education in Welsh while their parents have little or no knowledge of the language. The availability of subtitles makes it easier for Welsh speakers in such mixed households to choose to watch a Welsh language programme and allows non- Welsh-speaking parents of Welsh-speaking children the opportunity to follow the programmes watched by their children. Another reason for a channel such as S4C to subtitle is that it enables the broadcaster to claim the Welsh cultural niche and present
it to English-speaking viewers, this niche not being covered to any adequate degree by English language broadcasters. A minority channel choosing to subtitle in this way faces a choice between placing the subtitles openly on the screen so that all viewers must see them or offering them through teletext so that those requiring them must select them. Sensitivity to the feelings of the audience on this matter is needed and there may be strong disagreements within the audience about which is the best option. Many Welshspeaking viewers feel open subtitling to be intrusive and S4C has therefore elected to make the majority of their subtitles closed ones. There are some exceptions, however, and the repeat showing of the week s episodes of the most popular soap opera is screened with open subtitles. This contrasts with the practice in Scotland, for example, where a different policy is followed and subtitles are shown open on the screen. In a minority language situation, learners are a vitally important target audience and subtitles can be used in ways designed specifically to help them. S4C offers its viewers two sets of subtitles on different Teletext pages, 888 and 889. 888 is a straightforward translation service, whereas 889 subtitles Welsh programmes in simplified Welsh and offers translations of vocabulary likely to prove difficult. 889 subtitles are limited to two lines maximum and are held on screen from between 4 and 6 seconds or even longer if circumstances permit. These subtitles are also used by Welsh speakers who are hard of hearing although not specifically designed for them. The 889 service has been on offer since 1995 and there are now some 10 hours a week of programmes subtitled in this way. Subtitling is at present the chief method of translation on S4C. Digital technology makes it possible, however, to offer a number of different sound tracks in different languages for the same programme. This method is employed by the bilingual Breton / French channel TV Breizh. S4C seeks, however, to bring people as much as possible into contact with the language itself. It is possible that following a programme with subtitles while still hearing the original Welsh may promote acquisition of the language to some extent. To offer a separate English soundtrack on all Welsh-language broadcasts would permit viewers to have no contact with the language at all and this is one reason why it has not been done in Wales. This is, however, a controversial matter, with some people taking the position that the channel ought simply to provide the most complete service possible and not concern itself with language planning matters. The Basque Country It is interesting to compare the policies of various minority broadcasters. The different requirements of the various audiences as well as different broadcasting environments mean that the conclusions arrived at are quite diverse. ETB, the Basque broadcasting body, which came on air in 1982, has a policy that is almost the precise inverse of S4C s. The channel was conceived by the minister of culture of the still relatively new Basque Autonomous Government in the face of resistance on the part of Radio Televisión Española to the inclusion of Basque language broadcasts in the regional service for the autonomous community. This contrasts with the inception of the Welsh S4C, which was created as a result of a concession by the British
government (the Welsh Assembly did not exist at that time and it has, in any case, no powers in the field of broadcasting) in the face of popular pressure. A fairly substantial amount of foreign material is dubbed into Basque on ETB-1 and initially all these programmes were also subtitled in Spanish. However, in 1986 ETB divided its programmes between two channels, ETB-1 (which thenceforth broadcast exclusively in Basque) and ETB-2. This weakened the argument in favour of subtitling, which nevertheless continued for some time. However, it was deemed appropriate to remove the subtitles from children s and young people s programmes since more or less everybody in this age group in the Basque Autonomous Community has access to the language through the education system. There was debate over the continuation of subtitles on ETB-1, with weighty arguments being advanced for keeping them; the fact that part of the audience would be lost if they were removed; that Basque speakers living with monolingual Spanish speakers would find it difficult to watch the channel; that Basque speakers who had difficulty understanding would lose the help of the subtitles, as would learners; similar arguments to those used in favour of subtitling in Wales, where there is not, however, a second channel equivalent to ETB-2. The channel carried out some research into the matter and discovered that about 47% of those who regularly watched films on ETB-1 did not have a sufficient grasp of the language to follow without the subtitles. Of Basque speakers 22% reported that the subtitles helped their comprehension; 28% said that they made it more difficult to follow and the rest did not declare either way. There was not a great difference between inhabitants of different parts of the Basque Country but age made a definite difference. Of those under 25, only 10% said they needed the subtitles to follow a film; among those over 45 it was 30% (Larrinaga 2000). When asked whether or not the subtitling should be discontinued, the population was divided more or less half and half. However, after a period of consideration, the Spanish subtitles were removed on ETB-1 at the beginning of 1993. Subtitling in other languages in certain cases continued, however. If a Basque speaker s dialect, for example, is thought likely to cause problems for viewers speaking other varieties, then that person s speech is subtitled in standard Basque. The Basque government insisted early on that dubbing should be carried out in the private sector, although the first dubbed productions broadcast by ETB were the result of work carried out by a body known as Fibize, Filme Bikoiztuen Zerbitzua, which grew out of the training school established to prepare audiovisual professionals for the new channel. The first private dubbing studio was opened by the end of 1982 and today there are three. Cultural Implications of the Use of International Productions What about the cultural implications of making wholesale use of foreign (frequently American) material? Some argue that this is undermining to the native culture and that it is a far inferior alternative to that of using home production. Certainly, where productions can be made within the home country, this has many advantages and encourages the development of a native production industry and creativity through the medium of the language. It is also true that minorities are in a particularly vulnerable position with regard to the wholesale assimilation of alien cultural references. On the
other hand, however, it can be rather difficult to define what does and does not fall within the scope of a particular culture and many speakers of minority languages are keen to reject overly conservative definitions of their culture. Sometimes, what gets called global culture, i.e. mainly exported American material, may prove less alien and less threatening to a minority culture (however that is defined) than that which emanates from the nation state. A World Film News survey in the 1930s reported that those showing films in working class areas of Scotland thought some American films to be more appropriate for their audiences than most British films (Quoted in Morley and Robins 1995). So it is possible that transnational culture dubbed into a minority language might be thought of as a counterbalance to the imposed nation state one. It is precisely the fact that an English cultural text, for example, will often presume to address Welsh or Gaelic speakers as part of its national audience and assume a shared culture, that may be problematic for many members of those audiences. The same issues simply do not arise for these same audiences with texts imported from Japan. In addition, cultural meanings are not determined by a text itself in isolation but are contingent on context and interpretation (see, for example, Hall ([1973] 1980). Where the cultural background of viewer and producer are different, the way in which the viewer decodes the production is particularly likely to differ from the meaning intended by the producer. The home audience of the country in which the text is produced may, of course, also attach different meanings from the producer and, indeed, attach many diverse meanings to a production. The background of an entirely different language and national culture can, however, surely only increase these possibilities. An interesting example to illustrate this is that American thrillers and westerns in the 1950s and 1960s were read as right-wing texts in the states but in Britain were seen by some as an antidote to class-bound British culture (Kaplan quoted in Webster 1988). It is not possible, then, to say that the Catalan viewer of Dallas receives the same cultural message as the American audience for whom it was originally made. In this sense, they may not be watching the same thing. Moreover, since the language used is an integral part of the cultural identity of any audiovisual production, language transfer per se constitutes a change to that cultural identity. The production remains, of course, foreign to those who will view it in the target language(s), but will nevertheless be a different cultural product from the original. Dubbing and subtitling as tools also offer the possibility of exchange between linguistic minorities as well as between majorities and minorities. Here a two way process on more equal terms, where neither party is necessarily especially vulnerable to assimilating the cultural references of the other. Audiovisual Translation in the Cinema In the context of a television channel, one may wonder about how desirable it is to use large amounts of dubbed international material. However, in the case of cinema this is what constitutes the majority of what is available in any case, normally dubbed into the state language where necessary. Few minorities have reached a position where they can begin to think about having major Hollywood films dubbed into their language in the cinema and for those minorities within the English-speaking world it is probably not a desirable option anyway, since people are unlikely to wish to view a dubbed film when they can understand the original. The autonomous government of Catalonia has, however, attempted to insist that film studios wishing to circulate their products in Catalonia, dub a certain quota of them into Catalan rather than Spanish.
This provoked a major controversy in 1999 and five studios resisted strongly, bringing their economic and cultural influence to bear on the Catalan government and threatening a boycott, knowing that the Catalan population, like most others, is now accustomed to having the films of these studios available and would be unlikely to tolerate having to do without them. It has been suggested (Jones 1999) that the film studios motivation here was not only economic but also political in a sense, in that they wished to prevent a bad example being set which might be followed by other small language communities. Conclusions Subtitling and dubbing, then, are particularly critical issues for minority language broadcasters and communities. The uses to which they are put in minority contexts are perhaps more sophisticated and complex than is the case elsewhere and the judicious selection of the way in which they are employed is particularly crucial. Their capacity for serving a language planning agenda is also of great potential importance, particularly from the point of view of facilitating the task of language learners and reinforcing language acquisition among children as discussed by O Connell (2000 and 2004) although as she points out, dubbing and subtitling are not always harnessed in the optimal way to make the most of that potential. More consultation is needed between screen translators, language planners, teachers and other concerned parties. The different approaches of the broadcasters discussed above serves to demonstrate how the use of screen translation as a tool must be adapted to the needs of the audience in question and the social and political situation of both the language and the broadcasting organisation. References Hall, Stuart ([1973] 1980): 'Encoding/decoding'. In Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Ed.): Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79 London: Hutchinson, p. 128-38 Jones, Daniel E. (1999) Catalunya davant la prepotencia de Hollywood in Trípodos 7 Facultat de Ciències de la Comunicació Larrinaga, Asier. (2000) La Subtitulación en ETB-1 in Proceedings of Mercator Conference on Audiovisual Translation and Minority Languages Mercator Media, Aberystwyth Morley, David and Robins Kevin (1995), Spaces of Identity Routledge O Connell, Eithne (2000), Minority Language Dubbing for Children: Strategic Considerations in Proceedings of Mercator Conference on Audiovisual Translation and Minority Languages Mercator Media, Aberystwyth O Connell, Eithne (2004), Serving our Purposes: Audiovisual Media, Language Planning and Minority Languages in Mercator Media Forum 7, University of Wales Press, Cardiff
Webster, D. (1988) Lookya Yonder! The Imaginary America of Populist Culture Routledge