Linguistic Difference and Cultural Translatability: A Primer

Multilingualism at the multiplex: a new audience for screen translation?

“…Vehicular matching, with or without subtitles, does not by itself constitute any kind of solution to the problems of representation and othering on screen -as Joshua Miller puts it (2003: 140), "linguistic specificity as an ethical component of ethnic particularism will not solve systematic structures of racist and gendered violence". At the same time, as Seyhan (2002) argues, "neither an emphatic perception of linguistic difference and its attendant challenges nor the condition of cultural translation can exist in the monolingual environment". Vehicular matching would seem to constitute a necessary, if not sufficient, requirement for film to begin to embrace the plurality of natural languages and to engage with the post-Babelian translations and miscommunications which accompany the co-existence of languages.…”

“…At the same time, audiences -and this is also clear from class discussions with my own students -do not necessarily distinguish between post-subtitling in the conventional sense and part-subtitling as described above. This suggests that partsubtitling and subtitling for the domestic market, as in Men With Guns or the extremely successful Passion of the Christ (Gibson 2004) may function as important vectors in the introduction of new audiences to subtitled films and the engagement of their interest in seeking out further foreign-language products -what Seyhan (2002) has called the development of a "multilingual imagination".…”