ABSTRACT
Because film translation operates under a number of technical constraints, it is often assumed that the final target text is largely conditioned by those constraints and nothing else: x was left out because there was no space in the subtitles; x was substituted by another form of wording because of the need for lip sync. It is possible to argue, however, that the apparently objective, material constraints are in fact conventions or, in the terminology of Descriptive Translation Studies, norms, which raises the question: how much of the target text is itself manipulated, consciously or not, by norms rather than constraints? Can we detect normalising, repressing, levelling and censoring strategies in operation where there is no need for them other than the need for ideological, moral, and social control? This paper examines a small corpus of mainly subtitled French films and discovers that although, indeed, such strategies are dominant, film translation, like other modes of translation, is also subject to human randomness and simple cussedness, thereby countering the claims of those scholars who believe that they have found, in the concept of the invisible translator, the key to Western translation practice.
