Are You "Lost in Translation" (when watching a foreign film)? Towards An Alternative Approach to Judging Audiovisual Translation

"Translating" a text or film means transferring it to another context, whose readers or viewers usually do not share the same sociocultural background and codes as the original receivers. In Translation and Text Transfer, Anthony Pym describes this phenomenon as "the belonging of texts": texts/films are embedded in a spatiotemporal context in which they are maximally comprehensible. In film, this embedding is not only evident in the language(s) used by the characters, but also in the indexicality of the image itself (geographical and historical locus, dress code, non-verbal communication signs), the cinematic conventions adopted, etc. When a film is transferred to a different cultural context, because this degree of "shared knowledge" between author and original viewers is no longer optimal, verbal and non-verbal signs may not be interpretable by foreign viewers. This difficulty is commonly referred to as "cultural discount", denoting the idea that a film's linguistic and cultural specificity may jeopardise its success outside its original country of production/reception. The role of the audiovisual translator is therefore to find ways to facilitate the transfer of the film to a new environment (both textual and cultural) in order to loosen the "bonds of belonging" that tie the film to its original context of production. The author's contention in this article is that this transfer does not systematically involve "losses in translation", as is so often argued by both audiences and researchers. The author illustrates this argument with examples involving specifically the translation of culturally bound references, which constitute one of the main "moments of resistance" in a film's process of transfer to a new market.