The Acoustic Uncanny Valley and Cultural Alienation of Language: A Theoretical Framework for Structural Incongruity in High-Concept Media Translation

This paper introduces a theoretical model to account for the cognitive dissonance and aesthetic friction experienced by audiences consuming dubbed speculative or high-concept media. Moving beyond frameworks of translational competence, this study identifies two primary phenomena: The Acoustic Uncanny Valley and The Cultural Alienation of Language. This manuscript formulates a Dual-Stage Socio-Ecological Causal Model governing linguistic evolution to demonstrate that when a target language’s socio-ecological trajectory diverges from the source narrative’s ontological roots, complete acoustic substitution (dubbing) creates an unresolvable register mismatch. Additionally, the study analyzes the Subtitling vs. Dubbing Asymmetry, demonstrating why text-based translation bypasses the perceptual dissonance inherent to auditory substitution. Keywords: Acoustic Uncanny Valley, Cultural Alienation of Language, Dual-Stage Socio-Ecological Model, Subtitling vs. Dubbing Asymmetry, Register Mismatch, Hybrid Loan-Register Transcreation, Speculative Cinema, Audiovisual Translation (AVT).