Translation and film: Dubbing, subtitling, adaptation, and remaking

This essay extends the study of film translation beyond its traditional domains of dubbing and subtitling to cover film adaptation and remaking as forms of translation. Arguments that have long dominated popular and scholarly debate about these different forms of film translation are revisited to provide a historical perspective that will enhance appreciation of current issues such as identity and otherness, agency and ideology, context and intertextuality. Research trends in translation studies will be discussed in an attempt to discover the critical vocabularies, conceptual models, and analytical frameworks that are most useful for examining how, as social practices, dubbing, subtitling, adaptation, and remaking transform source texts and create new connections with other texts in a world increasingly characterized by digital distribution.