31(2) - 2019

La traducción al español del inglés afroamericano para doblaje: el caso de la serie Insecure

Natalia Méndez-Silvosa & Alicia Bolaños-Medina

 

Title
Translating African American English into Spanish for dubbing: The case of the series Insecure

Abstract
Nowadays, a substantial majority of series and movies comes from the United States, whose social reality has always been linked to the fight for freedom and the elimination of racism. These themes have often been depicted in audiovisual products. The African-American population has its own dialect: African American English (AAE). Although black people have long been present in films and television, AAE has only been realistically used in audiovisual media in the last few years. These characters pose a challenge to translators, and their growing presence in audiovisual products requires further analysis of this topic, which currently lacks an extensive bibliography. In this paper, we analyse the original text and Spanish dubbing from a selected corpus comprised of several episodes of the American series Insecure. After classifying the distinctive features of the AAE by their nature, we study how these characteristics are translated. We also compare both versions so that we can identify the most prominent translation strategies and techniques in each category. This analysis aims to determine if there has been any effort to reproduce AAE in the Spanish dubbing or if, on the contrary, it has been completely eliminated.

Keywords
Audiovisual translation, dubbing, African American English, language variation

DOI 10.17462/para.2019.02.02

October 19, 2019
  31(2) - 2019