Tangled in Audiovisual Translation: a case study of Romanian film dubbing

Adriana-Georgiana Grijac         Tangled in Audiovisual Translation: a case study of Romanian film dubbing 
 
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Argument 
Translation has become an essential part in our lives without which it would be 
impossible to communicate across different cultures. Developed to overcome cultural 
and linguistic barriers, translation has evolved over the years, going hand in hand 
with the evolution of society, culture and technology. In fact, with the advent of mass 
media, and due to globalization, there was an increased translation demand all over 
the world. Moreover, along with the growth of both television and film industry the 
need for Audiovisual Translation (AVT) emerged too. Within the field of AVT, 
Screen translation receives the most attention from scholars, as it refers to the 
translation of cinema, television, internet and DVD products. (Chiaro “Issues”, 141)     
This thesis stems from a personal interest in translating films, more precisely in 
dubbing as a form of screen translation. Dubbing is a particular type of translation, 
which imposes certain constraints to translators, such as: the limits imposed by visual 
images, lip synchronization, or the adaptation of cultural elements from one script to 
another. This implies that the role of the dubbing director is essential, because in 
addition to creating a corpus of translated dialogues in the target language, as close 
as possible to the source language, he\she also makes the narrative discourse 
accessible to an audience that over time becomes increasingly larger. The main 
objective of this work is to illustrate the intense and complex process that underlies 
the creation of a Romanian dubbed film. To do so, the first chapter, after 
Introduction, representing the theoretical framework of the thesis, will briefly 
describe the field of audiovisual translation, define the notion of dubbing and 
indicate the constraints which make dubbing a specific type of translation. The 
second chapter will describe the different stages that constitute the technical process 
of film dubbing in Romania, drawn up on the basis of direct contact with some 
practitioners (some significant interviews with dubbing professionals are provided in 
Annexes). In the final chapter, a contrastive analysis between the original script of 
the computer animated film Tangled and the Romanian dubbed version O poveste 
încâlcită will show how common translation issues, such as culture-bound elements 
and wordplay were dealt with considering the numerous constraints present in 
audiovisual translation, and dubbing in particular.
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Introduction 
The cinema industry is one of the most popular means of communication and 
entertainment among the multitudes of cultures of the world. A film is more than an 
expression of culture; it conveys not only the world as seen by the director and actors 
but also the society and environment of the era in which it was created. The end of 
the silent film era raised some problems for both European and American film 
producers: their products had to be translated to encourage their circulation outside 
the boundaries of the language in which they were created. This “interlingual 
transfer”, which facilitates the understanding of the cultures or ideas present in 
cinematic products or in any other audiovisual product (AVP), is called Audiovisual 
Translation (henceforth AVT) (Chiaro, “Issues”, 141).  
As AVT plays a great role in our everyday lives, in recent years, many scholars 
have focused their attention on this subject. Consequently, we can find numerous 
collections of articles in translation journals and works such as: “Topics in 
Audiovisual Translation” by Pilar Orero (2004), Jorge Dìaz Cintas and Gunilla 
Anderman’s “Audiovisual Translation: Language Transfer on Screen” (2009), etc.; 
there are also some Academic European Associations, such as the European 
Association for Studies in Screen Translation (ESIST), which also provide 
information in the field.  
According to Chiaro Delia’s classification, there are AVPs shown on a screen 
(products for cinema, television, internet, videogames, DVD and all electronic 
devices with a screen) and live ones, shown in theaters, at the opera and other live 
events that may require translation. (“Issues” 143). However, this thesis will focus on 
the translation of products for the “big screen”, namely films.  
Frederic Chaume, professor of Audiovisual Translation at the Universitat Jaume 
I (Castelló, Spain), explains that a film has many characteristic features, one of 
which being the co-existence of two channels of communication: a visual and an 
acoustical one. (“Film Studies” 16) In other words, we watch a film and hear it at the 
same time. Furthermore, Chaume describes film as being an audiovisual text. 
According to him this type of text is “a semiotic construct comprising several 
signifying codes [linguistic and non-linguistic] that operate simultaneously in the
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production of meaning” (“Film” 16), helping the audience to understand what they 
are watching. The words uttered by the characters in a film are referred to as “verbal 
communication”, whereas the body movements, gestures, sounds, colors, objects, 
etc., are labeled as “non-verbal communication”. (Chaume, “Translating” 315) Thus, 
the film composed of verbal and non-verbal signs can be regarded as a special text 
which transmits a message simultaneously using the visual and acoustical channels. 
Some scholars state that the two most widespread forms of language transfer on 
the screen are subtitling and dubbing. Subtitling, a visual mode, involves a written 
translation of the original dialog added on the screen, whereas dubbing is an acoustic 
translation (Baker and Hochel 74; Chiaro, “Issues” 141; Diaz Cintas and Anderman 
4; Zatlin 123).  
As mentioned by Yves Gambier in “Sequentia: A quarterly magazine on 
information sources published by the European Audiovisual Observatory”, the 
European countries are divided into two groups, according to their preferences for 
one of the two methods of translation: dubbing countries (France, Italy, Germany, 
Spain and Austria) and subtitling countries (the UK, the Netherlands, Scandinavian 
Countries, Greece and Portugal). (5)  
In May 2011, a bill was proposed in the Romanian Parliament for adopting 
dubbing as form of audiovisual translation. The reactions triggered by this proposal, 
say a lot about the Romanians preference for one of the two modes of audiovisual 
translation:  
The draft law was broadly (public, politicians, actors, directors, producers, 
communication specialists, teachers, TV people, writers, psychologists) 
criticised, arguing that the proposal would be beneficial only from an 
economic point of view for the dubbing firms, but would decrease the cultural 
quality of movies and would use Romanian actors for dubbing voices of 
foreign actors, instead of giving them time to prepare real parts in plays. The 
critics of the project also state that dubbing movies boosts isolation and 
intolerance and that Romania has to preserve its tradition of subtitling films, 
which had positive effects on foreign-language learning and practicing. 
(Cojocariu)
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It is more than obvious that the Romanian audience prefers subtitling over 
dubbing. Moreover, Iversson’s statement which says that “viewers are features of 
habit” (qtd. in Chiaro “Issues”, 147), gives another explanation for the reason why 
the Romanian audience had the above mentioned reactions. Even though our country 
has a tradition of subtitling films, for the past few years the cinema industry gave an 
upswing in dubbing animated films whose main target audience are children. 
However, multiplex cinemas offer both dubbed and subtitled films to please 
everyone: by watching dubbed films parents can enjoy the film without having to 
translate for their children, while the ones who understand the foreign language 
spoken in the film, or simply do not appreciate dubbing as form of audiovisual 
translation, can watch subtitled films. Moreover, thanks to new technologies such as 
DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) people are offered the possibility of choosing in which 
language to watch the film, since, as Gottlieb mentions, “there are (in theory) up to 8 
dubbed and 32 subtitled versions on one disc” in multiple languages. (“Subtitles” 
223). 
The choice of writing the present thesis on the subject of audiovisual translation 
is the outcome of combining two hobbies: translation and films. As a deduction from 
the previously mentioned characteristics of films, a translator cannot isolate the 
spoken dialogue, the linguistic level from the rest of the film (images) and render it 
as a simple text, but translate dialogues in relation to the corresponding images 
shown on the screen. This unique feature of the film as audiovisual text poses greater 
challenges for the translator, forcing him/her to be more creative than in other 
translating circumstances (literal, technical, etc.). Consequently, audiovisual 
translation is a very interesting object of study in terms of specificity of audiovisual 
texts, the interaction between the text and the image, and the repercussions that this 
has on the process of translation. Initially, my purpose was to examine both subtitling 
and dubbing of a film from English into Romanian but due to space constraints I had 
to limit my area of study only to one of the two modes. On account of the fact that 
dubbing is highly criticized in our country for being responsible of the film losing its 
charm, and by this people mean that the dubbed versions fail to reproduce the same 
comic effect as the original one, I felt challenged to look for an explanation and find 
out whether, why and to what extent these ‘accusations’ are true. Considering the
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fact that no thesis was dedicated to the study of dubbing as mode of film translation 
within the Philology and Cultural Studies Department of our university, the present 
paper will introduce the topic and provide some information about this recently 
adopted practice on the Romanian audiovisual market. Therefore, this thesis attempts 
to offer some answers to the following questions: 
 What are the peculiarities that make dubbing a complex translation 
process and how much impact do they have on the translation as 
product? 
 How is dubbing practiced in Romania?  
 How were potential problematic aspects of translation dealt with in the 
dubbed version? 
Methodology  
The answer to the first question will be based on the theoretical background 
provided by scholarly literature in the field. For the descriptive part, I will follow the 
lines of scholars who did research mainly on dubbing, and I will particularly follow 
the lines set by Frederic Chaume Varela. In his papers he assesses the specificity of 
films as audiovisual texts, namely the interaction of semiotic codes present at both 
visual and audio levels that makes translation more challenging; he also mentions 
several additional challenges present in dubbing, one of which is synchrony. Besides, 
my intention is to make a short comparison between subtitling and dubbing so as to 
provide a better understanding of these two concepts. In what concerns the chapter 
dedicated to the dubbing practice in Romania, I will start by giving a general 
description of the dubbing process recorded by Chaume in his paper “Dubbing 
practices in Europe”, followed by a description of the practice with focus on 
Romanian dubbing based on the personal experiences of Anca Sigartău (dubbing 
director), Ioana Sandache (dubbing translator) and Alina Chinie (voice of Rapunzel, 
the female main character of Tangled), expressed in (e-mail) interviews, which can 
be found in the Annexes. Unfortunately, the information provided by the three 
professionals, were not technical or specific enough to give a detailed insight into the 
world of Romanian dubbing. Occasionally, I used other indirect sources (which I had 
hardly found) to help portray the world of dubbing. To my disappointment, I could
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not cover the economical aspects or the institutional norms to form a complete 
picture because I did not consider the indirect sources to be reliable enough and the 
above mentioned direct sources avoided approaching these issues. Nevertheless, the 
whole idea of outlining the technical process of dubbing was meant to show its 
complexity in comparison with other types of translation. In dubbing, the translated 
script is just a draft which passes through several hands and stages before it becomes 
what we hear and see on screen. I emphasized the verb hear because in dubbing, the 
translation is perceived acoustically, since the dubbed soundtrack completely 
substitutes the original one, while subtitling is perceived visually as a written 
translation at the bottom of the screen which supplements the original soundtrack.  
The third chapter introduces the object of the study, namely the computer-
animated feature Tangled. It was directed by Nathan Greno and Byron Howard and 
produced by Roy Conli, John Lasseter and Glen Keane from Walt Disney Animation 
Studio. The film features the voices of Mandy Moore, Zachary Levi, and Donna 
Murphy, among others.  
This film has been chosen as object of study first of all because in Romania only 
films for children are available also in their dubbed version; secondly, although 
animated features are known to be designed for children, Tangled was critically 
acclaimed as being worthy of adult interest with many tongue-in-cheek adult-
oriented lines, not to mention allusions and cultural references, which make it the 
perfect object of study. The fact that the film was available on DVD format, made 
the research easier. Watching both the original version of the film and the dubbed 
one, almost simultaneously, I could spot the lines relevant for this study and gather 
them to form the corpus subject of this analysis. 
Based on the fact that synchronization demands for more creativity in translation 
and adaptation choices, the second part of the chapter will focus on the aspects that 
are commonly known as challenging for translators, namely cultural elements such 
as: cultural references, culture specific jokes, idioms and other possible aspects. 
Considering the formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence proposed by Eugene 
Nida, some of the cultural elements mentioned above will be selected from the 
English version of the animated feature to see how they were adapted for the
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Romanian audience in the dubbed version. My hypothesis is that the dubbed version 
will reflect a dynamic equivalence.