Translating business film material
A joint workshop held by Aston University and the WMG on
Saturday 10 December 2011 at Aston University
Business as usual? Far from it. This workshop led by Dr
Jean-Pierre Mailhac from Manchester, who trains professional translators and
postgraduate students in various European countries and carries out research in
applied translation studies, was exceptionally enlightening, engaging and entertaining.
Throughout the day the seven postgraduate students and nine professional
translators and interpreters were guided by Jean-Pierre, who has himself
translated, recorded and supervised recordings of film material for a wide range
of companies over the last 20 years ,through the problems and pitfalls of
translating and recording business films.
The theoretical part comprised a detailed description of a
pressured environment in which translators must first prepare a reasonable quote,
then juggle the demands of a complex translation context in which they have to
create, condense and synchronise the spoken target text with the film.
Moreover, they have to do justice to a wide variety of features peculiar to the
AV context, including: meaningful accents, dialects and intonation, wordplay
and cultural dimensions. The presentation was enlivened by some amusing
anecdotes of ruffled corporate cool, sound engineers' frustrations and
mismatches between the translated text and the film material: 'the difficulty
of finding the right product' as a commentary for a scene in which a lady
effortlessly lifts a tin of baked beans
from the shelves. In practical exercises we wrestled with problems such as
recognising and conveying pronunciation, alliteration, assonance (Waggle/Busy/Buddy)
and wordplay in several 5-7 minute films, covering anything from publicity for
the Euro (nice one!), to hedge trimmers that were a 'cut above the rest'.
My thanks to both Jean-Pierre and Christina Schäffner of Aston
University for presenting and organising the workshop, also to all those
professionals and students who attended and helped make this a most instructive
and enjoyable day.
Jean Darvill 13
December 2011