When investigating a large subtitled corpus such as the Scandinavian subtitles corpus (Pedersen, 2007), it becomes apparent that subtitlers do indeed go through the process of determining the transculturality status of cultural items. This is seen mainly through the strategies they use for rendering the references in the subtitles. If the treatment of the reference in TL media is taken as a yardstick for the transculturality status, it becomes apparent that Scandinavian subtitlers in the vast majority of cases make what could be called ‘accurate’ transculturality decisions. This is hardly surprising, as the subtitlers who have produced the texts are professionals with a predominantly long experience as cultural mediators through their subtitling activities. Interventional strategies are indeed used on most monocultural references, and minimum change strategies are used on the infra- and transcultural ones, unless some other variables interfere, such as the constraints of the medium or the interplay between the channels of information in the text. The picture is not as simple as has been suggested here, but that need not concern us for the moment.
One example of how the interventional strategy of substitution has been used on a reference that was rightly appraised as monocultural is shown in Example 1. It is taken from a Danish TV2 2000 broadcast of the sitcom
Frasier (1999). The main character, Dr Frasier Crane, is on the phone to his
young son, Frederick, who lives with his mother in a different city. Frederick has apparently had a nightmare because Frasier is trying to calm him by
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saying: “Calm down, son. Listen to daddy. It’s just a bad dream, I promise you…”
(Example 1) ST: Senator Thurmond is not in your closet. Subtitle: Mogens Glistrup står ikke i dit skab. Back translation: Mogens Glistrup is not standing
in your closet.
In the subtitle, the very conservative Senator Strom Thurmond (1902-2003), who was, at the time, the oldest member of the US senate, and who looked scary, was replaced by the very conservative Danish politician Mogens Glistrup (1926-2008), who was also old and whose ugliness was almost legendary. This kind of translation license, to replace a SC person by a TC person used to be fairly common in Denmark up until the late 1980s (Gottlieb, 1994:50), but has since dwindled dramatically in usage, and is arguably ethically questionable. That is not the point here, however. The point is that the reference to Thurmond was rightly determined to be monocultural, with no support from the co-text or the context, and it was thus dealt with accordingly.
The trend, in Scandinavia at least, seems to be moving towards an increased use of retention and other minimum change strategies. There are many explanations for this. One very simple explanation is that most subtitled material in Scandinavia comes from the USA and the UK, and the Anglophone influence on Scandinavia has increased considerably in the last decades, and will probably continue to do so. This means that there are increasing numbers of transcultural references, as Scandinavians learn more and more about the British and American cultures.
Another explanation is that, in Sweden at least, there used to be a tendency for subtitlers to ‘chew the food’ for the viewers, mainly in the days when the public service companies were the only broadcasters in Scandinavia. These have a responsibility as educators, which might have led to a tendency for subtitlers to intervene more often than was strictly necessary. With a growing number of private broadcasters and TV channels, this imperative became less palpable.
A more unsettling reason for this development may be that the situation for subtitlers in Scandinavia has become more austere. Deadlines have become shorter and salaries have decreased drastically (Carp, 2006). This is of great importance here, because it takes time to determine the transculturality of a reference, and then, if it is judged to be monocultural, it takes even more time to research it and come up with a successful solution of use to the viewers. If subtitlers have a very narrow deadline, then they may have to forego this transculturality appraisal. Similarly, if subtitlers are
Jan Pedersen
poorly paid, they will have to produce more subtitles to make a living. This in turn means that they have less time to spend on each subtitle, which may also cause them to forego the transculturality appraisal and the attendant hunt for an ideal solution. The result would be more retention, as this can be seen as a constant option, the argument being that there is no harm in retaining a cultural reference. Instead, the viewer is receiving a verbatim account of the original utterance which s/he may not understand. The result may look like Example 2 below, which comes from the cop movie Striking Distance (1993). A dead body has been dragged out of the river, and the investigating officer gives an estimate of the time it had been in the water. He is then contradicted by another officer, the drunken, down-and-out character Tom Hardy, characteristically played by Bruce Willis, who gives what sounds like an expert opinion. The rather miffed investigating officer then replies sarcastically:
(Example 2) ST: Thank you, Jack fucking Webb. Swedish subtitle: Tack, jävla Jack Webb. Danish subtitle: Tack, fucking Jack Webb.
It should be clear without a back translation that the reference to Jack Webb has been retained with no attempt at cultural mediation from either the Swedish or Danish subtitlers, the latter having used a Swedish master template file for the translation. This is in spite of the fact that the reference is very clearly monocultural since Jack Webb was the actor who played Sgt Joe Friday in the US cop show Dragnet (1951-1959), a series which has never been aired in Scandinavia. The TT audience would thus be potentially confused by the subtitle. The subtitles were, perhaps typically, produced by what could be called a low-budget subtitling company.
7. Conclusion
This article has set out to explore how subtitlers know when to opt for benevolent intervention and act as cultural mediators and when not to do so, by appraising a cultural item’s transculturality status. It has been shown how this is done through the use of intuition as being part of the TT audience, through the aid of the ST and also through the use of secondary sources. The trend, at least in Scandinavia, seems to be for this transcultural appraisal to become less demanding, partly because of globalisation, which has the effect of lowering the number of monocultural items. More unsettling, though, is the evidence of the tendency among some subtitlers occasionally to forego the transculturality appraisal due to the external pressures of deadlines and salaries. This arguably results in lower quality subtitles, as some viewers are
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left in the dark, without any means of accessing certain cultural referents, calling for more research into the correlation between subtitling quality and the (worsening) working conditions of subtitlers.
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