Proceedings - Translation Concepts

MuTra 2005 – Challenges of Multidimensional Translation: Conference Proceedings
Jan Pedersen
ECRs have been rendered in a TT and also explain why they have been rendered in this way.
Applied on a significantly large corpus, this model should go a long way towards uncovering
the translation norms that are operative for that corpus. It has indeed served the present author
well when applied on a corpus of one hundred films and TV-programs and their subtitles.
Interestingly enough, it has also illustrated a tendency about the translatability of culture in
subtitles. If all seven parameters work against a subtitler: i.e. if you have a Text External and
Monocultural ECR, which is central to the film, the Intersemiotic Redundancy is low, the Co-
Text offers no guidance, the media-specific Constraints are high and the Paratextual
Considerations has shown you e.g. that you are dealing with a general audience without
particular knowledge of the subject matter of the film at hand, then none of the seven
strategies may offer a solution and you may have an untransferable ECR on your hands.
However, after analyzing about one hundred thousand subtitles, the present author has still to
come across such an ECR.
Fig. 4: The “untransferable” ECR
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