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Editorial published Blitz with Beto confused among his boxes 
on the cover; the lovely Other Press jacket shows an hourglass 
against a black background, flecks of gold floating away. At the 
cinema, we will see which Blitz takes the starring role: la novela 
de la crisis, la tragicomedia romántica, or the one of lightning 
bolts and hourglasses, of loss and dislocation.

     Ann Manov

Dror Abend-David, ed. Media and Translation: An 
Interdisciplinary Approach. New York/London/New Delhi/
Sidney: Bloomsbury, 2014. 365 pp.

Dror Abend-David, the editor of this fine collection of research 
papers, has been able to bring together in a collaborative effort 
23 translation studies scholars from eight countries. He has also 
provided clearly-worded one-page introductory notes for each of 
the seven parts of this translation studies anthology. The book 
is about audiovisual translation in its multiple and all-pervasive 
manifestations. 

The three chapters in Part I (Film Translation and Adaptation) 
elaborate on the classical Jakobsonian L1-to-L2 translation 
paradigm by suggesting a more nuanced methodology to analyze 
film as a text in the wide sociocultural sense. The methodology 
takes account of elements in another language or languages (that 
is, L2 in Jakobson’s schema) such as idiolect, dialect (regional 
and social), peculiarities of style and diction, slang/jargon, and 
foreign accents incorporated in a film. These “extra” features 
are described as L3 (language 3) components of the film’s text. 
This novel, more nuanced approach to film translation analysis 
is introduced briefly in the opening Chapter 1 and illustrated in 
detail in Chapter 2, which compares Quentin Tarantino’s multi-
lingual film Inglourious Basterds (2009) with its representations 
in the form of dubbed versions in German, Spanish and Italian. 
The three translations illustrate a complex simultaneous interplay 
of interlingual, intralingual, and semiotic factors and confirm the 
researchers’ initial hypothesis that there is no one universal 
solution: the final unique mix of languages in the dubbed version 
of an L3-saturated film is determined by the specific source text 
of the film in its varying sociocultural settings and the professional 
competence of the translator/s. Chapter 3 further develops the 
general theme of Part I by examining the way in which Tsotsitaal 
(a South African township variety of slang) is represented in 
the English and French subtitled and dubbed versions of Oliver 
Schmitz’s South African film Hijack Stories (2000). 



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Part II (Subtitling and Dubbing) examines how the already 
pre-fabricated film dialogue (its intended prosody, morphology, 
syntax and lexis) is subjected, in the process of dubbing into 
a different language, to standardization/neutralization, source 
text interference, explication, simplification, normalization, and 
leveling out. In Chapter 4, this is illustrated by the Spanish 
dubbed version of the American television series Friends, with 
the resulting dubbed product being a compromise between 
intradiegetic and artificial extradiegetic factors. Chapter 5 of 
Part II looks at some damaging effects of dubbing into Italian 
of mostly English-language films where the original dialogue 
track is excised but the new Italian text does not fit in well with 
the original film’s visual sequences, sound effects and music. 
Apart from examining ways of aesthetically harmonizing the new, 
dubbed dialogue track with the other given components of films, 
the chapter analyzes cases where the individual qualities of an 
actor’s voice (timbre, pitch, speech peculiarities, etc.) change the 
intended impact of a character on the film’s audiences. 

Chapter 6 constitutes the whole of Part III (Media and Computer 
Translation). It reports the results of a set of experiments 
designed to evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of live subtitling 
of television programs and films for foreign, language-learning, 
and hearing-impaired audiences. Live subtitling typically 
combines human re-speakers and speech recognition software. 
The carefully designed experiments described in Chapter 6 
demonstrate that the currently widespread live subtitling is still 
a long way from relying exclusively on re-speaker-independent 
software, i.e. completely autonomous machine translation. 

Part IV (Between Literary and Media Translation) consists of 
two chapters. Chapter 7 looks at subtitling Japanese films as an 
“abusive fidelity” practice that inevitably leads to multiple versions 
of a film even in the same language. It is argued that, while a literary 
translation is likely to be treated as a genuine replacement of its 
original written text, film subtitles are perceived to be rather an 
appendix or addition, especially given the ubiquity of new digital 
technology that can create, recreate, add and remove scrolling 
or box subtitles at the whim of the individual viewer. Chapter 8 
discusses literary translations and film adaptations of fantasy 
literature for young audiences, analyzing, among other works, the 
multimedia adaptations of such globalized texts as The Chronicles 
of Narnia, The Spiderwick Chronicles, the seven Harry Potter 
books, Arthur et les Minimoys and others. Fantasy, especially for 
young people, has become a global trans- and multiple-media 
phenomenon attracting different kinds of translation: subtitling, 
dubbing, rewriting in other languages, incorporation in computer 
games, autonomous visual representation, and other cross-



Delos    177

cultural activities. 
Chapter 9 (Part V: Translation, Communication, and 

Globalization) considers the challenges involved in translating 
verbally- and audiovisually-expressed humor. In particular, it 
examines the results of a series of surveys aimed at establishing 
the extent to which Italian viewers perceive translated humor via 
subtitles and dubs in audiovisual products. Using Ari Folman’s 
Hebrew-to-English subtitled film Waltz with Bashir (2008), the 
contributors to Chapter 10 in Part V analyze the film’s strategy 
of depicting some extremely traumatic episodes during the 
Lebanese Civil War in 1982.  This animated film is notable for the 
conscious refusal by its adaptors to provide English subtitles for 
an episode in which an Arab woman is wailing in grief and crying 
something out in Arabic. Her words are not subtitled on the theory 
that the globalized audiences not familiar with the geographical, 
historical, and cultural context of the scene would get a more 
acute visceral sense of the atrocities without the visual hindrance 
of subtitles. 

In Part VI (Global News and Politics), Chapter 11 offers a 
theoretical framework for identifying and assessing the means 
and extent of reframing international news in the process of 
translation by a major Chinese newspaper. The model integrates 
several perspectives: most notably, Norman Fairclough’s critical 
discourse analysis, J. R. Martin and P. R. R. White’s approach 
to appraisal in systemic functional linguistics, and Mona Baker’s 
model of re-framing strategies in translation. Chapter 12 examines 
the latest empirical research on Israeli Jewish viewers’ reactions 
to a set of English-language broadcasts on the same subject. 
The aim of the experiments was to identify the audience’s initial 
biases but, more importantly, to ascertain the viewers’ ratings of 
the levels of credibility and professionalism of such transnational 
news networks as CNN, the BBC, Fox News, and Al-Jazeera 
English. The obtained research results indicate that, contrary to 
the researchers’ initial hypotheses, ethnocentrism still plays a 
major role in viewers’ deciding what international news network to 
choose and that, in the majority of cases, the viewers’ decisions to 
assign a higher credibility rating to a particular supranational news 
network are determined by the accent and name pronunciations 
they hear rather than by the actual contents of the news. 

Chapter 13 in Part VII (Promotions, Commercials, Tweets, 
and Minisodes) examines paratexts such as trailers, minisodes , 
websites, alternate reality games, and user generated content as 
vehicles for promoting U. S. television series in the Italian multi-
media space. The chapter focuses on the strategies that have 
been used for the linguistic and cultural adaptation of the paratexts 
promoting the U. S. television series Glee (2009-2015) and 



178    Reviews

Breaking Bad (2008-2013) in Italy. Chapter 14 examines cultural 
adaptations involving images and associations in translating 
English-language commercials into Chinese. The chapter argues 
that the translator should first identify the conative, cognitive, 
and aesthetic needs engaged in motivating the receivers of the 
commercial in the English-language source culture to buy a 
certain product and then construct a translation using the same, 
similar, or a different combination of triggers (lexical and cultural) 
to activate a set of needs leading to a purchase of that product in 
the target Chinese culture. 

There is a list of contributors and the abstracts of their 
contributions at the back of the book.

This book is a cutting-edge contribution to the rapidly developing 
field of comparative translation studies. Covering multiple 
languages (Afrikaans and some other South African languages 
[Zulu, Sotho, Tswana, Xhosa], Arabic, Chinese, French, German, 
Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish), the book is 
a rich source for teaching theory and practice of multi-media 
translation to a wide cross-section of classes with mixed “first” 
and “second” language backgrounds and identities.

     Alexander Burak

The Video Poem as Transnational Vacation Artifact: Donny 
Correia, writer and director. Madryn.  Mallarmida Filmes, 
2012. 11 min. 

A dystopic present reverberates from the doldrums of post-
industrial society in the opening moments of Brazilian Donny 
Correia’s video poem, Madryn.1 The film, a transnational, tri-
lingual, postmodern postcard, explores the quotidian distress 
of modern life through this poetic portrait of a coastal vacation. 
Through sonic resonance from British musical composers (Danny 
Sanchez and Elizabeth Ann Martin of SEVERIN), collaged verse 
from Argentinian poet Silvia Iglesias, and voice-over excerpts 
from T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Correia enacts a poetic vision 
of the borderless pursuit of reprieve throughout the (dis)locating 
flux of contemporary modern life.  

1   The entire film can be viewed on Youtube, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=xtrq0ZXpKgI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtrq0ZXpKgI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtrq0ZXpKgI

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