ABSTRACT
This chapter examines film translation as a practice contextualized within the politics and technologies of representation at work in the film industry. It takes a view of translation as an enabling mechanism that has ensured the global reach of film and, equally, as a transformative force that has shaped cinema throughout its history. We argue that the focus of the discipline of audiovisual translation on descriptive and pedagogic aspects of interlingual transfer reproduces misperceptions of translation as a derivative process and misses the opportunities that the study of film translation affords to expand our understanding of the transnational experience of cinema. The chapter provides a historical overview of film translation, suggesting that it constituted a concern for filmmakers and distributors already from the silent era, not least because it questioned cinema’s pretension to being a universal language. The chapter then summarizes audiovisual translation’s main theoretical achievements before establishing the need to promote an alternative approach to translation as a film-transformative practice. We discuss contributions from film studies and translation studies, and conclude with some recent interdisciplinary theorizations that emphasize the key role of translation in debates around the history, semiotics, (geo)politics and aesthetics of cinema.
