An account of interlingual subtitling in multilingual films on the grounds of an integratedmodel for the analysis of audiovisual texts

Resumo

Interlingual subtitling of films, where a source language is translated into a target language, is often a fascinatingpractice to subtitlers for many different reasons, such as the direct contact with the multimedia and cinema industries,and the fact of dealing with different languages and cultures. In the case of multilingual films, the subtitler’s competencehas to be focused on several languages, rather than on a single one, in principle, making this task more complex.Furthermore, contrary to other translation modes, the audiovisual text is characterised for having certain codeswhich determine the subtitling strategies to be employed. This study focuses on the subtitling of the multilingualfilm Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino 2009) into Spanish by Arturo Enríquez, and is based on Chaume’smodel (2004a), which approaches the audiovisual text through an integrated model where Translation Studies andFilm Studies converge. In this paper the comparative and process models are utilised to cover the following issues:firstly, it looks into the challenges encountered by the subtitler into Spanish, not only on the grounds of the linguisticfeatures of the languages involved, but also on the subtitling technical restrictions, and also provides an accountof the most recurrent translation strategies utilised; secondly, it concerns the way swearwords are currently dealtwith in interlingual subtitling; thirdly and, finally, by means of a triangulation approach through the quantitative andqualitative analysis of data, along with an interview granted by the subtitler, this study aims at providing incentivesfor further research in the field of interlingual subtitling when dealing with multilingual films.