Constructing the Other: Linguistically Manifested Otherness in Audiovisual Translation

Broadly speaking, Otherness indicates a departure from the norm; however, this definition presupposes the existence of a norm and of those which do not subscribe to it, being thus “different” or “other”. The notion is closely related to another concept in social sciences, namely identity. This chapter starts from a brief excursus on sociological and philosophical aspects of Otherness, but then proceeds to peruse it from the perspective of translation studies. Rather than draw on literary translation, as many authors have done, the present text is inspired by the genre of audiovisual translation; it is assumed that the intersemiotic and constrained nature of AVT causes the translator’s task of rendering Otherness to be more daunting, simultaneously making research into it more fascinating. As presented in the chapter, Otherness has many facets: from minorities of all kinds (ethnic, gender, religious), through multilingualism, the fictional portrayal of extraterrestrials, to the prime goal of translation, which is to make the target text accessible to an audience or readership other than that of the source text. It has implications for directionality, in particular as regards the degree of inflectionality of the source and target language (Otherness may produce different challenges depending on the linguistic resources available in the languages in question). The chapter also briefly addresses censorship in certain AVT modalities (chiefly dubbing), which may have a dampening effect on the rendition of the Other. Mention is also made of media accessibility, in particular subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing, as a particularly challenging environment for rendering Otherness. On balance, translating Otherness is far from straightforward; skopos, the translator’s (in)visibility, the strategy chosen and the modality in the case of AVT are just some of the factors to take into account.