ABSTRACT

Retranslation has received far less attention in the audiovisual translation field than in the literary domain, where it is deemed a positive phenomenon. Within the audiovisual field, retranslation tends to be either negatively received or overlooked. While some research over the past decade has focused on redubbing, resubtitling (i.e. comparing two or more sets of subtitles of the same source text, dating back to different periods) has long remained neglected from a retranslation perspective. The present paper aims to address the issue of retranslation using the case study of two Italian films distributed in the UK as an empirical basis: Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) and Federico Fellini’s La Strada. Two sets of English subtitles produced for each film, 43 years apart on average, are compared according to a two-level analytical framework, technical and translational. The study shows that, although major improvements can be observed on a technical level, the more modern retranslations seem to depart further from the original dialogue than the older subtitles. Therefore, the notion of ‘retranslation as improvement’ and the retranslation hypothesis are questioned.

摘要

在视听翻译领域，重译受到的关注远远少于在文学领域中被认为是积极现象的文学领域。在视听领域中，重新翻译往往被否定接受或被忽视。尽管过去十年中的一些研究集中在重做上，但是从重新翻译的角度来看，重新字幕（即比较源于不同时期的同一源文本的两套或更多副字幕）长期以来一直被忽略。本文旨在通过案例研究在英国发行的两部意大利电影作为案例基础来解决重新翻译的问题：维托里奥·德·西卡（Vittorio De Sica）的《骑自行车的小偷》和费德里科·费里尼的《拉斯特拉达》。根据技术和翻译两级分析框架，对每部电影制作的两组英语字幕（平均间隔43年）进行了比较。研究表明，尽管在技术层面上可以观察到重大改进，但较老的字幕似乎更现代的重新翻译与原始对话的距离更远。因此，“重新翻译即改善”的概念和重新翻译假设受到质疑。