Natália Izard, Barcelona, Spain
In her book, Text Analysis in Translation (1991. Amsterdam: Rodopi) Christiane Nord distinguishes several factors which operate on a text. These factors are divided into two large groups: intratextual, and extratextual factors. The most relevant of the extratextual factors, also called “situational factors”, are: sender, recipient, time, place and function. Here the influence of these factors on audio-visual texts will be considered, and whether these factors exert a different influence than on written texts. This exercise will help to build a model of analysis for audio-visual texts, and in the future, a model for audio-visual translation. The analysis will examine if and how the situational factors participate in the manipulation of the text.
The specific case studied is Catalan public television. The Catalan language was banned from public use during the 40 years of Franco’ dictatorship. Since 1984 the Catalan public TV aims to encourage and increase the everyday use of the language.
Therefore, translations for Catalan TV have a very important political implication.
Proceeding with the analysis, the situational factors can be defined as the ele
ments that turn a text into an act of communication. A text has a sender, a recipient, a time, a place, and a function. In a translated text, sender, recipient, time, place and function might change. These factors can be analyzed separetly, but they are interre
lated: they affect each other, and they depend on each other.
When analyzing the sender and the recipient from an audiovisual text, two things must be considered:
(1) The number of people that influence a text in filmmaking is much greater than in publishing. Making and launching a film involves many more people than writing and publishing a written text.
(2) There is a stronger economic influence in filmmaking than in publishing. Mak
ing a film costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, which have to be paid back at the box office. A publisher can afford publishing a book for a few thousands of readers, but a producer cannot afford making a film for such a small target audience. In the specific case of television it not only has a strong economic component, but also impor
tant social implications, as its target audience is the whole society. Therefore, the sender and the recipient are more complex, as well as the relationships between them.
l.The sender
The sender is not the same as the author. The author is the person who has actu
ally produced the text, and the sender is the person who puts the text in contact with the recipient. In written texts, the author is normaly the person responsible for the
Section 3. MediaT/I
text. Only in some “anonymous” cases is the author not mentioned, and the text appears to have been produced only by the sender. This is the case in commercial, political, and publicity texts. In this cases, the anonymous author follows the direc
tions of the sender.
As previously stated, film and television are complex, so there are several partici
pants responsible for each factor. In television, the senders are the producer and the television channel, and the authors are, the director and the scriptwriter. In televi
sion more often than not the authors are secondary, they follow the instructions of the senders. In the case of a translated TV program, the sender of the original text is the studio that produced it, and the sender of the translated version, is the television channel which broadcasts it.
The sender has an intention, or rather, several intentions, that combine to form a hierarchy. The intentions of the source sender are not necessarily the same as those of the target sender. Sometimes they are the same, but combined differently in the hierarchy.
In TV programs, the intention is often very culture-specific. This is the case of sit
coms or soap operas, whose main objective is to entertain, and the sub-aim is to give the recipient enough connotative elements as to make him/her feel part of the story.
The source intention is, therefore, appellative. In the translation of these programs, the target recipient does not respond to the connotative elements in the same way.
The translator can manipulate the text to make it more familiar to the target audi
ence, so they respond to the appellative intention. If the translator does not manip
ulate it enough, the text will only keep the entertaining intention and lose all its appellative power.
Television has a strong economic factor. The main purpose of a program is to be economically successful, so the intentions of the sender should be directed towards that objective. In the translated version, the sender combines the intentions in his/
her own hierarchy, and adapts them to the target culture, to achieve economic success in that culture. Here is an example: the American western Along the Great Divide, was very succesful in Spain. The title was manipulated and became Camino de la horca, which means ‘On the way to the gallows'. When it was translated for Catalan TV, twenty years later, the sender decided to be loyal to the old Spanish title, instead of being loyal to the original title. They wanted the audience to recognize the film, and therefore to retrieve the original success. The sender’s intention was not to be loyal to the original, but to achieve a successful broadcasting.
2. The recepient
The second factor is the recipient. The recipient is the person for whom the text is intended. So many target-oriented scholars stress the importance of the target recipient. A translation is never addressed to the same recipient as the original. The target recipient has presupositions and expectations that are different from those of the source recipient.
In order to fullfil the expectations, or to raise the attention of the target recipient, the translator (who works under the directions of the sender) can adapt the text:
change the language style; omit obvious details; add information when something is incomprehensible; etc. The difference between such a manipulation of a text in a
Natália Izard
written work or in a film is that in film, the text has to be adapted to the images. The translator is not completely free, since the words very often refer to the images. If the translator wants to change the style of the language, he/she has to make sure that the style used matches the look of the characters, according to the expecations of the tar
get recipient. If she wants to change a joke, because it will work better with the target recipient, she has to make sure that the new joke is compatible with what is going on on the screen. Here is an example of how the target recipient may require an adapta
tion of the text in order to fulfill their expectations.
The French TV show Héleneet les gargom was produced for a young target audi
ence between the ages of 12 and 14. In order to adapt the show to the Catalan recip
ient, the sender manipulated the language style. A very soft and sentimental lan
guage was changed into a sharper, smarter style, which is the way Catalan teenagers speak.
3. The time of communication
The next factor is the time of communication. The time when a text is produced determines its language style. The translator, when translating an old text, can choose between keeping the old style (which is called historizising translation), or adapting it to the modern usage (which is called re-creative translation), depending on the translation skopos. In film, as well as in written texts, choosing one option or the other will depend on conventions of the culture. Every era has had its own conven
tions or translation styles.
This is particularly clear in the case of Spanish dubbings of the American films from the fourties and the fifties. These dubbings are still popular today and they often re-run on TV. The style of the language is so defined that when the audience hears such dialogues they immediately know what kind of film it is. The specific translation style will give the recipients an immediate clue as to what kind of film they are watch
ing.
But the time factor affects not only the language. Since a translation is a new ver
sion in a new time, it will have different senders and recipients from those of the orig
inal. And different senders and recipients mean different customs, different expecta
tions, different values that the translator must take into account.
4. The place of communication
The factor place of communication operates in a similar way to the time. A change of the place of communication will affect all the other situational factors. A different place means a different culture: different presupositons, different expectations, dif
ferent assumed elements for the sender and the recipient. These differences may require some manipulation of the target text.
A good example that shows how a change of place of reception requires some adaptation of the text. In the English sitcom Fawlty Towers, one of the characters, Manuel, is from Barcelona. He is uncultured and dumb. When it was translated into Catalan, the sender (Catalan TV) thought that the Catalan recipient would not accept that Manuel was one of their own. So the text was manipulated and Manuel became Mexican.
Section 3. MediaT/I
5. The function of the text
The last factor to be analyzed is the function of a text. The function is the com
municative objective of a text in its specific reception context. It is a combination of all the other factors. The function of a text is the result of the intention of the sender, received by the recipient, in a given place and at a given time. This means that in a translation, since the sender, the recipient, the time and the place change, the func
tion might consequently change. The more culture-specific the function of the origi
nal text, the more likely it will change in the translation.
In the case of Catalan TV, the main function of all broadcasts is to promote the use of the language. Therefore, in the translated material, the promotional function will be performed prior even to intertextual coherence with the source text. The func
tions of the source text, or other functions in the target hierarchy, will be placed be
low the promotional function.
The case study of the situational factors in the translations for Catalan Public TV leads to two main conclusion. Firstly, the sender and the recipient play an extremely important role. Secondly, they follow the dictates of economy, sociology and politics.
And these two things lead to yet one more conclusion: The text cannot be studied any longer as an isolated item, but indeed as an item immersed in a system of ecnon- omy, politics, and sociology.