Transcreation, a fact of culture. A creative strategy across audiovisual genres

Abstract

As a translation-related activity, transcreation, which is challenging the original concept of translation and the notion of equivalence, has received increasing academic attention in recent decades within the general context of translation studies and, more visibly, within the specific area of audiovisual translation, although on the conceptual level, interest in transcreation has been growing since 1996. Transcreation as a persuasive and target-oriented type of creative translation provides interlingual types of adaptation and/or forms of re-interpretation of original messages within multimodal frameworks within in which registers and tones, images and words are transferred from source to target languages and cultures, with the scope of producing new visual-textual typologies. Against the backdrop of the 21st century, which has seen a boom in the application of new technologies to audiovisual translation and accessibility practices, a scenario punctuated by the escalating presence of transcreation and localisation across streaming platforms and TV broadcasting and websites, including blogs and videos of all kinds, testifies to the rapid growth of original audiovisual content coming from a heterogenous variety of media settings and in a plurality of languages. This has compelled media localisation companies to react and adapt to the new market and to the needs of contemporary audiences, who are increasingly eager to consume audiovisual productions from far afield, as long as they are localised in their own languages. In brief, the global spread of transcreation across the academia and industry has transformed the domains that embrace the audiovisual sector and the media in general, as well as affecting the chief modes of audiovisual translation, primarily including dubbing, (sub)titling and voice over. In line with recent research on AVT and transcreation as communicative resources in the creative industries, and on the notion of creativity as a fundamental tool in the transcreation process viewed as semiotic adaptation and manipulation, as well as being an AVT operational instrument as a consequence of digitalisation, the article scrutinises the concept of transcreation from an academic perspective and takes into account the professional dimension of the practitioner in order to shed light upon issues of media creativity seen as leading to the transcreational turn in audiovisual translation. Presenting a heterogenous corpus of films, digitally streamed TV series and international screen advertising for TV and the web, the study highlights the perspectives and modalities according to which creativity intervenes in transcreational processes. A description of the methodology used to investigate the data under scrutiny and the selection process applied to carry out the analysis will precede the practical section of this survey, which will be devoted to the examination of culture-specific references (CSRs), on the one hand, and on the other fixed expressions, idioms, sayings, proverbs, wordplays, slang and dialects, as intralinguistic and extralinguistic culture-bound references respectively, since they both pose significant translation challenges. For this purpose, a contrastive analysis based on a comparison between English audiovisual products and their Italian transcreations is carried out by employing the taxonomies of translation strategies proposed by Jorge Díaz-Cintas and Aline Remael (2022), and Irene Ranzato (2016). The analysis will aim to prove how and to what extent transcreation combines mechanisms of linguistic creativity, cultural manipulation, recreation and creative interpretation with the scope of providing the user linguistic and cultural access to the media, as well as of testing the role of AVT in the creative industries by showing the modalities by means of which transcreation makes use of creativity in a translational context. The study of transcrea