VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ********************************* TRẦN THỊ NGÂN AN EVALUATION OF THE TRANSLATION OF THE FILM “RIO” BASED ON NEWMARK’S MODEL Đánh giá bản dịch bộ phim “Rio” dựa trên mô hình của Newmark M. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field : English Linguistics Code : 60220201 HANOI – 2016 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ********************************* TRẦN THỊ NGÂN AN EVALUATION OF THE TRANSLATION OF THE FILM “RIO” BASED ON NEWMARK’S MODEL Đánh giá bản dịch bộ phim “Rio” dựa trên mô hình của Newmark M. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field : English Linguistics Code : 60220201 Supervisor : Assoc. Lâm Quang Đông HANOI – 2016 DECLARATION I declare that the thesis entitled „An evaluation of the translation of the film “Rio”, based on Newmark‟s model‟ reflects the findings of the study conducted by myself.
The thesis is submitted to University of Languages and International Studies – Viet Nam National University, Ha Noi for the Degree of Master in English Linguistics. It has not been submitted for the award of any degree or diploma in any other tertiary institutions. Hanoi, 2016 Trần Thị Ngân i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This thesis would not exist without the immense encouragement which I received along the way from my supervisor, my family, my colleagues and my friends. First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Assoc.
Lam Quang Dong, who has lent his expertise to flesh my ideas and provide reference sources. I am indebted to him for his enthusiasm, kindness and dedication during my course of study. I also take this opportunity to thank all my lecturers and classmates at Faculty of Graduate Studies for their inspiration to me. Besides, I am grateful to my friends and my colleagues for their valuable advice and great encouragement.
Last but not least, I would like to deliver special thanks to my husband for his kind support which helps me a lot in completion of this thesis. ii ABSTRACT This thesis assesses the translation quality of the Vietnamese version of the film “Rio”, which was translated and dubbed in the project of MegaStar Media Ltd. Company, Viet Nam in April 2011. To reach its aim, the study used four methods including analysis and comparison, which were based on Newmark‟s model.
In addition, statistical and observational methods were also applied to examine the synchronisation of each utterance and its translated version. The research instrument was “Aegisub”, a free open-source cross-platform subtitle editing program designed for timing and styling of subtitles. The researcher‟s purpose was to see how well utterances in both versions of the film are synchronised with each other. The research findings show that in general, the film was well-translated in terms of structures, proper nouns, hierarchical pronouns, borrowed words and puns.
Weaknesses of the translation were found in the title and several mistranslations. The study also reveals that the translated utterances were synchronised with the original ones quite well, especially in terms of duration. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS.
iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS. vi PART 1: INTRODUCTION. Aims and objectives of the study. Scope of the study.
Method of the study. Significance of the study. Organization of the thesis .5 Chapter 1: LITERATURE REVIEW. Definitions of translation.
Translation quality assessment. Synchronisation in dubbed films. An overview of previous studies .16 Chapter 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY. Restatement of research question.
Data collection and analysis procedures .21 Chapter 3: ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION .A brief analysis of the SL text. The author‟s purpose. Characteristic of the readership. The translator’s interpretation.
Omission of the original text. The translator‟s method. The translator‟s prospective readership. Comparison of the translation with the original.
Hierarchical pronouns as a cultural feature. Some minor issues. Synchronisation of the translated film. Further discussion of the translation.
Potential importance of the work within the target language culture……. Limitations of the study. Suggestions for further studies. I v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS TQA: Translation Quality Assessment ST: Source Text TT: Target Text SL: Source Language TL: Target Language AVT: Audiovisual translation vi PART 1: INTRODUCTION 1.
Rationale It is said that translation has received a lot of attention from linguists, scholars and especially translators. Typically, in the era of globalization and integration, interaction among nations and the need to exchange information and cultures have become greater. Translation has been regarded as one of the most effective tools that satisfy people‟s need to entertain and enrich their knowledge about the world. It is undeniable that translating a film from one language into another is really a challenging task because of its important role in bringing understanding of the texts to the “readers” with different knowledge backgrounds.
In fact, film translation is a widely discussed topic among linguists. Adapting a film from the source language to the target language requires a lot of translators‟ efforts. In film translation, not only is the translator dealing with basic issues of translation, such as linguistics, ideological and cultural barriers, but he or she is also facing with the multimedia constraints such as synchronisation in dubbing or the appropriateness of the characters‟ lip movements, the syllables or even the number of syllables. In the field of film industry, “Rio” is the first Hoolywood 3D cartoon dubbed in Vietnamese under a project of MegaStar, one of the biggest film importers in Viet Nam, and the 20th Century Fox (Sai Gon Times Online Newspaper).
Review from website Rottentomatoes.com, an 18-year-old American review aggregator website for film and television, and a variety of others, indicates that “Rio” is really highly appreciated by viewers and critics. From the day of its release, “the film was also a box office success, grossing over $143 million in the United States and $484 million worldwide” (Wikipedia). The author of this study is impressed with the high elaborateness in the process of dubbing. According to Vietnamnet Online Newspaper, Vietnamese voice actors, including actress Minh Hang, actors Minh Tiep and Dai Nghia, were selected by the film director himself.
Then the voice dubbing was carried out under the supervision of American experts. Furthermore, 1 the dialogues were translated in Viet Nam while songs were translated in the United States of America. After that, Vietnamese musicians edited the songs. Next, Vietnamese artists sang the songs and sent them back to the U.
In fact, there are different ideas about how film translation should be defined and what should be the methods, as well as the criteria to assess its quality. Therefore, conducting a research to examine the success and drawback of the translation of a film is expected to bring about benefits to language learners, translation assessors and especially to the film industry. Aims and objectives of the study This study was conducted with the aim of applying Newmark‟s TQA model to evaluate the quality of the translated version of the film “Rio”. With this aim, the objective of this study is to examine the success and the shortcomings of the translation of the film “Rio”, based on Newmark‟s model.
Research question The study addressed the following question: What are the strengths and weaknesses of the translation of the film “Rio”, according to Newmark’s model? 4. Scope of the study As previously mentioned, this study was undertaken to assess the translation quality of the film namely “Rio”. Both the original and translated film scripts were chosen for analysis based on Newmark‟s TQA model. Additionally, the audio of the two versions of the film was also measured to see the duration, the starting time and ending time of each utterance.
Furthermore, articulatory movements and postures in the film were observed to examine the phonetic synchronisation between the original utterance and its translated version. Methods of the study The study was carried out with four methods as follows. - Analysis method: film scripts in both English and Vietnamese were examined in terms of the topic, the prospective readership, the translation method, the title, the structure, proper names, hierarchical pronouns, borrowed words and puns. - Statistical method: the software named “Aegisub” was applied to measure the duration, starting time and ending time of each utterance in the film scripts.
- Observational method: phonetic features of the close-up of each utterance in the 2 versions of the film. - Contrastive method: Data collected by the above methods were compared to assess the advantages and disadvantages of the translation of the film. Significance of the study Currently there have been devoted researchers interested in audiovisual translation; however, studies on the quality of the translated version of a specific film have not been conducted yet. Therefore, the very first purpose of the researcher when conducting this study is to figure out how good the English-Vietnamese translation of the film “Rio” is.
The assessment lay not only on the film scripts based on Newmark‟s model but also on the duration, starting time, ending time and phonetic features of each utterance in the two versions of the film. In terms of implication for film translation, the thesis is expected to offer several useful lessons to the film industry. Organization of the thesis The thesis is composed of three main parts. Part One is the INTRODUCTION in which the rationale, the objectives, the scope, the research questions and the organization of the thesis are presented.
3 Part Two, the DEVELOPMENT, consists of three chapters. Chapter 1, Literature Review, reviews the previous studies related to the topic and a brief theoretical background with concepts such as definition of translation, translation methods and procedures, translation equivalence, and Newmark‟s model of translation quality assessment. Chapter 2, Research Methodology, describes the research-governing principles, data collection and data analysis procedure. Chapter 3, Analysis and Discussion, offers a detailed analysis of the data, the results obtained and discussions of these results.
Part Three is CONCLUSION. This is the last part which provides a recapitulation of the main points presented, together with implications for film translation, limitations and suggestions for further studies. Last but not least, the Appendix presents the film script in both English and Vietnamese. In the analysis, examples taken from the scripts to be examined are abbreviated for convenience.
For illustration, the text numbered 10 in page I of the appendix will be shortened as (A10 – p. 4 PART 2: DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1. Definitions of translation For most people, translation is simply understood as to transfer the meaning of speech or written texts from one language to another. In fact, however, theorists approached translation studies differently with various definitions of translation.
Translation is the procedure leading from a written SL text to an optimally equivalent TL text, and requiring the syntactic, semantic, stylistic and text pragmatic comprehension by the translator of the original text. The translated version must be absolutely accurate in meaning, contain all nuances of the original, and must be written in clear, elegant language that can be easily understood by the reader. Needless to say, punctuation spelling and grammar must be flawless”. However, this definition is not so persuasive since it over-appreciates the role of grammar in translation.
For a formal notion, Dubois claims “translation is the expression in another language (or target language) of what has been expressed in another, source language, preserving semantic and stylistic equivalences” (Bell, 1991:5). In 1959, Roman Jakobson, a structural linguist, offers a quite detailed definition of translation that is distinguished among three kinds as follows: o Intralingual translation, or rewording, is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language. o Interlingual, or translation proper, is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language. o Intersemiotic translation, or transmutation, is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.