Round Table 2: Power, Ideology and Manipulation in AVT
Convenor: Jorge Díaz Cintas
Speakers: Maria Miquel Iriarte - Raquel Merino - Ilaria Parini - Luis Pérez-González - Mina Qavani-Adel

ABSTRACTS

Maria MIQUEL IRIARTE
Censorship on television in Franco’s Spain: The case of Estudio 1

During the years of dictatorship and the period of transition to democracy (1939-1985) all translation practices were checked in Spain by the censorship organisations of both the Catholic Church and the Government. Records from both registers are now beginning to be made accessible for research purposes and, at present, there is an increased interest in research on censorship to understand a dark period of Spanish history. In the context of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) there has been some research carried out by TRACE (TRAnslation and Censorship), a research group of both University of the Basque Country and the University of Leon. TRACE has focused mainly in written translation and it is my aim to start a thorough investigation on AVT; especially on the translation for TV. The reason is that during that period of Spanish history TV was a powerful and very popular media which enjoyed a unified audience – there was nothing else available. It may be the case that the results regarding censorship could be more conclusive and stereotyped.The presentation will focus on Estudio 1, a TV programme broadcast by TVE (the Spanish national television) based on the adaptation and broadcasting of both Spanish and foreign theatre plays, sometimes written by controversial authors such as J.B Priestley, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller and Noel Coward. The presentation will look at the data compilation and its preliminary analysis, the execution of a catalogue with the source and target texts, the selection of representative texts, the comparative-descriptive analysis of the selected texts and the final formulation of translation rules regarding censorship.

Raquel MERINO
Research on Censorship and AVT in Spain: new perspectives
For a few years two teams of (TRACE) researchers at the University of the Basque Country (www.ehu.es/trace) and the University of León (http://trace.unileon.es/) have been carrying out research using censorship archives as the basic source of information. The main methodological framework used has been DTS. Narrative and theatre, as well as films, have been quite thoroughly catalogued and analyzed for the period 1939-1985. Other related research topics (f.e. theatre broadcast on Spanish Television, TVE, 1965-1985). have recently been tackled in the Universitat Autònoma in Barcelona.
A parallel line of research started around 2004, using TRACE methodology: the study of foreign programmes translated and broadcast in Basque television channels (ETB1-Basque- & ETB2-Spanish) 1983> 2006. Work on regional television channels opens, to be sure, a new line of research that can draw on existing TRACE investigations. In actual fact, the early 1980s are key years for which we have information from sources heavily linked with Franco’s regime as well as data on audiovisual products from the new autonomous regions’ emerging television channels.
As the two main pieces of research on Basque television (Barambones and Cabanillas, http://www.ehu.es/trace/tesisytrabajos-mtracedea.html) render more information, derived from the catalogues compiled and AV products analyzed, there is a stronger need for more research on foreign AV products in other Spanish regional channels (f.e. channels broadcasting in Catalan or Galician). Such research would be vital to compare parallel situations within Spain. But there would also be a European dimension that needs to be explored: the situation as regards broadcasting in other minority languages such as Irish or Welsh. We have tentatively explored cases like TG4 or RTÉ in Ireland, in relation to Basque television, but this remains to date an open avenue for further investigations.

Ilaria PARINI
Censorship of anime in Italian distribution
Editing of anime – Japanese cartoons – is a process through which the product is altered in order to be made appropriate for the public. Such a practice is quite common all over the western world, and Italy is no exception. Japanese anime are not conceived only for an audience of children, and there exist different types of products aimed at publics of different ages. In Japan there are proper broadcasting time slots for each age group, starting from the morning till late at night, and anime are shown during the various slots according to their characteristics. In Italy, on the contrary, cartoons are generally considered a product targeted exclusively at children, and even those anime which were originally conceived for an older audience are broadcasted during the protected time slot. This is mainly due to economic reasons, as the advertising of products and gadgets related to such cartoons is usually undertaken during the afternoon slot. Consequently, since these anime are broadcasted in a protected time slot, they have to comply to certain canons of content and language. Censorship thus takes place both at the visual and at the verbal level: scenes considered inappropriate (because too violent or too sensual) are removed from the story, the plot is often changed, the text is frequently domesticated in its references to the Japanese culture, and the language is flattened (every reference to the semantic field of death, for example, is to be avoided, and vulgar or strong expressions/interjections are turned into unlikely neutral utterances). Italian translators take active part in the editing of anime: as they are the first ones to actually see the episodes, they are supposed to report any ambiguous element they come across (which will then be removed during the phase of post-production), and they perform the verbal censorship, manipulating the language as is expected by the commissioners. The Italian association ADAM (Associazione Difesa Anime e Manga) has been actively fighting against this kind of censorship since 1997, but the main free terrestrial channels still continue to edit all the anime they broadcast.

Luis PÉREZ-GONZÁLEZ
Subtitling and the formation of activist subjectivity

In recent years, a growing body of scholarship has begun to explore the interventionist subtitling practices that the engagement of amateur translators (mainly affiliated to certain strands of media fandom) with the global flow of digital audiovisual commodities has brought about. But against a background characterised by constant technological developments, the proliferation of social networking platforms and the increasing availability of tools for the manipulation and dissemination of audiovisual products, subtitling is now also being increasingly appropriated by mediators pursuing political agendas. In this context, subtitling – and, more widely, translation – is fast becoming a trope through which activists can subvert the conventions and discursive practices of mainstream cultural industries and justify their adoption of alternative mediating paradigms.
The first part of this presentation outlines the theoretical framework underpinning this study of activist subtitling – which draws mainly on the conceptual apparatus of media sociology – and reports on the main objectives of this work in progress:

• achieve a better understanding of subtitling as a means of political resistance against institutional, assimilationist representational practices in the mass communication industry;
• establish how subtitling contributes to the formation of activist subjectivity;
• assess the role that transgressive subtitling plays in the increasingly disjunctive process of cultural reception — specifically by strengthening the fragmentation of target audiences into political micro-constituencies.

The second part of the presentation focuses on the methodological difficulties that the analyst encounters when attempting to compile and interrogate this type of data. Two versions of a news interview – subtitled by amateur activists and posted on their respective blogs – are used to illustrate my approach to the analysis of activist subtitling and to systematise the most salient features of this form of mediation.

Mina QAVAMI-ADEL
Censorship in Persian dubbed movies

The current study is an attempt to investigate the cases of censorship in dubbed movies in Iran and to establish the norms based on which the whole system is operating to apply this strategy in any mode of translation. It seeks to answer these questions:

1. What are the most common strategies when applying censorship in dubbed movies in Iranian TV? Are they rule-governed? How?
2. What are those determining factors in the application of censorship? Are they ideological ones?
3. Does censorship cause any significant changes in the whole meaning of the text of the film? If yes, how much?
   to which the following answers are provided:
   The most common manifestations of censorship include: deletion, adjustment and alteration in word choice or mistranslation, all of which are rule-governed according to the norms governing the target culture.

• Factors contributing to the application of this strategy are mostly related to sexual behaviors which are considered as both religious and cultural. Thus all are ideological changes which are applied according to the norms governing the target country and culture.
• The influence of this strategy in the product of the work of translation may result in the improvement or destruction of the final result. It is observed that when there’s a change, it is due to the socio-cultural norms of the target society.

To analyze the data collected, translation shifts are utilized, since it seemed to the researcher that censorship is a kind of shift in ideology.
Another point to be mentioned is that censorship is observed to function in two distinctive forms: one censorship of the scenes and the other censorship of the words uttered.
The theoretical framework is mainly descriptive building on the theory of DTS proposed by Holmes and later on developed by Toury. Since the research is closely related to Audio-Visual Translation, culture and norms, the researcher has tried to follow the models and framework presented by Even-Zohar on “Polysystem Theory” and Gideon Toury on “Cultural Norms”. The movies under the study named “Godfather” have already been shown on TV in Iran.
Scope and delimitations: The purpose was to explore some strategies that contribute to certain shared methods of censorship in dubbed movies in Iran. Therefore, the scope of research is delimited to merely omission, euphemism and alteration in words and scenes.