TRANSLATION STUDIES AND FILM STUDIES: NEW TRENDS

This is the fourteenth issue of Language Value, the journal created by the Department of English Studies at Universitat Jaume I (UJI) over 12 years ago. Since its beginning, the journal has grown and progressed, and, at this moment, it is already indexed and recognised internationally. In this evolution, many persons have left their imprint, some of them from the department that devised this journal. One of these persons was Raquel Segovia Martín, who unfortunately left us one year ago. Raquel arrived at Universitat Jaume I from the University of Pittsburgh (USA), where she had obtained her PhD degree in Languages and Film Studies and taught Spanish language and culture courses. Since very young, she had been interested in the Spanish language: she had finished her bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Philology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. However, she saw an opportunity to adapt her profile and to participate in the new project of Universitat Jaume I in 1994, once she had decided to come back to Spain. At this university, she could combine her knowledge of Spanish and English in translation courses and add to it her expertise in film and communication studies. She was a good teacher and a good colleague who left us much too soon. This volume is in memoriam of Raquel Segovia Martín, and the articles included in it are all related to her profile: translation, cinema and communication.

Translation has always been an interesting and even passionate topic of research, especially when related to films and television, because of the transfer of meaning between cultures it involves (Segovia Martín, 2003, 2009). Audiovisual translation has dramatically evolved in the last century, especially in countries such as Spain, where foreign films and TV programmes are usually dubbed. Chaume, a well-known colleague at the Department of Translation and Interpreting at UJI, has paid special attention to the cultural, sociological and cognitive aspects of translation and to the evolution of the methodologies used all over the world (2018, 2019).

Moreover, cinema has also been considered a tool for effective language learning, especially English, as it combines entertainment with authentic or realistic situations where the language is used (Herrero-Vecino & Vanderschelden, 2019). Segovia Martín showed her interest in cinema symbolism in her research (1996, 2008), and she also explained some years ago how the (re)productions of English language texts by several media could provide valuable research and educational material for English language departments (Segovia Martín, 2003). In this same line, some authors have claimed the many advantages of cinema watching and its possibilities in language learning. For example, Talaván and Rodríguez-Alarcón (2014) have found reverse subtitling effective for collaborative language learning, and Giamperi (2018) uses films to provide students with situations where authentic colloquial language is employed.

Communication was Segovia-Martín’s third area of research interest (Segovia Martín, 2007a, 2007b). It was fostered by her teaching of English in the Audiovisual Communication degree, and, in her research, she dealt both with the linguistic and the multimodal nature of advertising discourse.

This special issue consists of five articles, all related to translation and cinema. The first one, written by Josep Roderic Guzmán-Pitarch, deals with the effect of L4 on Translation students’ L1/L2 Catalan writing. Though no statistically significant difference is found between the German L4 group and the French L4 group in the use of adverbial pronouns, there seems to be some evidence of a more intense use of these pronouns among students learning French as an L4.

In the second article, Iván Villanueva-Jordán compares two trailers of the HBO series Looking with the original soundtrack and the dubbed version adapted to Latin America. Following a multimodal analysis model, this author tries to find out the effect of the semiotic integration of the paratexts on the narrative aspects of the series.

Noha Abdallah Mohamed Moussa and Miguel Ángel Candel Mora, in the third article, show their interest in the translation methodologies for subtitling films in Spanish when the original soundtrack is Arabic. The aim of their study is to confirm that the translation rules devised for translations in which English is either the source or the target language can also be applied to other languages, especially regarding the treatment of cultural issues. The results seem to indicate that the usual methodologies and rules used in Audiovisual Translation Studies are not always suitable for linguistically and culturally distant cultures.

The next article is more focused on language learning, more precisely, on pragmatic competence, through the analysis of films. The authors, Esther Usó-Juan and Alicia Martínez-Flor, illustrate how the analysis of film dialogues fosters learners’ (meta)pragmatic awareness as they realise that communication is a context-dependent act.

The fifth and final article is focused on cinematic or film studies. Nieves Alberola-Crespo and José Javier Juan-Checa make a deep study on the filmography of Douglas Sirk, an American filmmaker from the 1950s, and on how he subtly criticised contemporary American society when dealing with themes such as social justice, sexuality and gender issues. In this article, the authors focus on the image of the American housewife in the movie All that Heaven Allows (1955) and the tribute film by Todd Haynes, Far from Heaven (2002), from a feminist perspective. They highlight how the latter uncover controversial aspects that were already dealt with in Sirk’s movie but could not be made explicit to American society at that time.

This Special Issue ends with two book reviews. In the first one, Roser Sánchez-Castañ introduces a recent publication, the book edited by Koponen et al. (2020) Translation Revision and Post-editing: Industry Practices and Cognitive Processes (Routledge), in line with the studies on translation presented in this volume. The second review, by Ana-Isabel Martínez-Hernández, of the book by Haba-Osca et al. (2020) Llegir la Imatge. Il·lustrar la Paraula. Reflexions al voltant del llibre il·lustrat i el còmic (Uno editorial) explains the values of the several modes found in picture and comic books: words and images.

The idea when the Department of English Studies decided to devote one Special Issue of Language Value to the memory of Raquel Segovia Martín was to create an issue she would have enjoyed reading. We think we have achieved this aim and hope that all the readers can also enjoy it.

Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez

Department of English Studies

Universitat Jaume I

REFERENCES

Chaume, F. (2018). An overview of audiovisual translation: Four methodological turns in a mature discipline.Journal of Audiovisual Translation,1(1), 40-63. https://doi.org/10.47476/jat.v1i1.43

Chaume, F. (2019) Audiovisual Translation. In R. A. Valdeón-García & M. del C. Á. Vidal-Claramonte (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Translation Studies (pp.311-351). Routledge.

Giampieri, P. (2018) Spoken language features (and anomalies) in films for ESL classes. Language learning in higher education, 8 (2), 399-425.

Haba-Osca, J., Martínez-Carrasco, R., Safont Pitarch, J., Ferragud Ferragud, M., & Muñoz López, G. (2020) Llegir la Imatge. Il·lustrar la Paraula. Reflexions al voltant del llibre il·lustrat i el còmic. Uno editorial.

Haynes, T. (2002) Far from Heaven. Film distributed by Focus Features.

Herrero-Vecino, C. & Vanderschelden, I. (Eds.) (2019) Using film and media in the language classroom: reflections on research-led teaching. Multilingual Matters.

Koponen, M., Mossop, B., Robert, I.S., & Scocchera, G. (Eds.). (2020). Translation Revision and Post-Editing: Industry Practices and Cognitive Processes (1st ed.). Routledge.

Segovia Martín, R. (1996). El cuerpo humano como símbolo en el Jardín de las Delicias: el tríptico de El Bosco en la película de Carlos Saura. Verba Hispanica, 6(1), 129-144. https://doi.org/10.4312/vh.6.1.129-144

Segovia Martín, R. (2003) La incidencia de los textos mediáticos en la enseñanza/aprendizaje del inglés como lengua extranjera. ELIA, 4, 35-50.

Segovia Martín, R. (2007a). The rhetorical dimension of printed advertising: a discourse-analytical approach. Cultura, Lenguaje Y Representación, 5, 151-163. https://www.e-revistes.uji.es/index.php/clr/article/view/1356

Segovia Martín, R. (2007b). Los discursos publicitarios en la imagen social del transporte: Lo privado vs lo público. Cuadernos de Geografía 81-82, 119-132.

Segovia Martín, R. (2008). El contexto social del 68 en el discurso cinematográfico: Milou en Mai / The social context of 68 in the film discourse: Milou en Mai. Dossiers Feministes, 12, 99-119.

Segovia Martín, R. (2009). Transfer phenomena and intercultural movements of texts. Journal of Intercultural Communication, 19. http://www.immi.se/intercultural/

Sirk, D. (1955) All that Heaven Allows. Film distributed by Universal Pictures.

Talaván, N., & Rodríguez-Arancón, P. (2014) The use of reverse subtitling as an online collaborative language learning tool. The interpreter and translator trainer, 8(1), 84-101.