Multilingualism at the cinema: A translation perspective

International audienceIn this seminar, you will be invited to reflect on the implications for translation, reception, and translation theory, of the presence of multilingualism in film. The first question we examine is multilingualism itself. When is a film truly multilingual, what are the reasons behind the film makers’ choice, and in which ways does multilingualism contribute to advancing the plot or to character depiction? Multilingual interactions represented on screen may include code-switching and code-mixing, intertextuality, intralinguistic variation (e.g., archaic language, dialects, sociolects, idiolects) or the use of invented languages. Its presence may be limited to a few words or phrases in a language other than the main language of the film, but sometimes the spectators find themselves invited to what Delabastita (2002) called a “great feast of languages” – mediated by translators. Which types of translation strategies work best in such cases, and how multilingual can a translated film be, in a given context? Audiences themselves are not always monolingual, and the ‘other’ language in a film could be the mother tongue of some of the viewers