"Minä tietä se! - I know this one!": Examining the sense of foreignness in the character's manner of speaking
Helenius, Aliisa (2021)
2021
Englannin kielen, kirjallisuuden ja kääntämisen kandidaattiohjelma - Bachelor's Programme in English Language, Literature and Translation
Informaatioteknologian ja viestinnän tiedekunta - Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
This publication is copyrighted. Only for Your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.
Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2021-01-18
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202101041034
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202101041034
Tiivistelmä
The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the sense of foreignness is conveyed in the character’s manner of speaking in the dubbed Finnish version of the Netflix series The Adventures of Puss in Boots compared to the original English version, and whether the possible different methods create unnecessary stereotypes in the target text. Dubbed shows have been studied to a great extent globally yet in Finland dubbing could be studied more thoroughly.
The theoretical framework of this study is mostly centered around dubbing, its’ synchronies and the challenges that the translator faces when translating for dubbing purposes. In addition to the normal problems associated with translation and those with audiovisual translation, there are even more to consider with dubbing. Such are the challenging synchronizations of lip, voice and character, the latter being the most relevant for this study. I use studies of language learner stereotypes of English and Finnish to gather features that would have possibly been used to express foreignness in both source and target texts.
The research data for this thesis is the second episode of the first season of the Netflix series The Adventures of Puss in Boots. The series has a large set of characters who speak with different dialects and accents, wherefrom I chose to examine the speech of the main character, Puss in Boots, who is a well-known character and has a foreign background. The series has at least one other character, Señora Zapata, who seems to have a foreign background as well, but she had only two lines in the episode. Therefore, I thought that the main character would be more ideal to study since he is the focus of the series and thus offers more material to study.
The results of my analysis suggest that the foreignness in Puss in Boots’ manner of speaking is more prominent in the dubbed Finnish version than in the original English version. In the dubbed version, Puss’s speech has an immense amount of grammar and pronunciation mistakes which impact the fluency of his speech greatly. The original English version has only a few non-standard pronunciations which do not decrease the fluency of Puss in Boots’ speech. Due to the poor equivalence considering the expressions of foreignness in Puss’s speech, the portrayal of Puss in Boots in the dubbed version does indeed create an unnecessary stereotype on how those whose native language is not Finnish speak.
The perception of dubbing is not widely studied in Finland. As the results of this thesis demonstrate, dubbing can negatively affect the character synchrony and create different presentations of characters in the target text compared to the source text. The results of this thesis cannot however be generalized, since only one episode and one character were examined. Instead of just comparing the source and target text, future research could perhaps focus on the perception of the dubbing by the audience as well.
The theoretical framework of this study is mostly centered around dubbing, its’ synchronies and the challenges that the translator faces when translating for dubbing purposes. In addition to the normal problems associated with translation and those with audiovisual translation, there are even more to consider with dubbing. Such are the challenging synchronizations of lip, voice and character, the latter being the most relevant for this study. I use studies of language learner stereotypes of English and Finnish to gather features that would have possibly been used to express foreignness in both source and target texts.
The research data for this thesis is the second episode of the first season of the Netflix series The Adventures of Puss in Boots. The series has a large set of characters who speak with different dialects and accents, wherefrom I chose to examine the speech of the main character, Puss in Boots, who is a well-known character and has a foreign background. The series has at least one other character, Señora Zapata, who seems to have a foreign background as well, but she had only two lines in the episode. Therefore, I thought that the main character would be more ideal to study since he is the focus of the series and thus offers more material to study.
The results of my analysis suggest that the foreignness in Puss in Boots’ manner of speaking is more prominent in the dubbed Finnish version than in the original English version. In the dubbed version, Puss’s speech has an immense amount of grammar and pronunciation mistakes which impact the fluency of his speech greatly. The original English version has only a few non-standard pronunciations which do not decrease the fluency of Puss in Boots’ speech. Due to the poor equivalence considering the expressions of foreignness in Puss’s speech, the portrayal of Puss in Boots in the dubbed version does indeed create an unnecessary stereotype on how those whose native language is not Finnish speak.
The perception of dubbing is not widely studied in Finland. As the results of this thesis demonstrate, dubbing can negatively affect the character synchrony and create different presentations of characters in the target text compared to the source text. The results of this thesis cannot however be generalized, since only one episode and one character were examined. Instead of just comparing the source and target text, future research could perhaps focus on the perception of the dubbing by the audience as well.