Catherine Earnshaw in Japan

A new scholarly book with Brontë-related content:

English Classics in Audiovisual Translation

Edited By Irene Ranzato, Luca Valleriani

Routledge

ISBN 9781032560274

October 23, 2024

This collection explores the translation of dialogue from the adaptations of literary classics across audiovisual media, engaging with the question of what makes a classic through an audiovisual translation lens. The volume seeks to fill a gap on the translation of classic texts in AVT research which has tended to focus on contemporary media.

The book features well-known British literary texts but places a special emphasis on adaptations of the works of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare, figures whose afterlives have mirrored each other in the proliferation of film and television adaptations of their work. Chapters analyze myriad modes of AVT, including dubbing, subtitling, SDH, and voice-over, to demonstrate the unique ways in which these modes come together in adaptations of classics and raise questions about censorship, language ideologies, cultural references, translation strategies, humor, and language variation. In focusing on translations across geographic contexts, the book offers a richer picture of the linguistic, cultural, and ideological implications of translating literary classics for the screen and the enduring legacy of these works on a global scale.

This book will be of interest to scholars in audiovisual translation, literary translation, comparative literature, film and television studies, and media studies.

The book contains the chapter Catherine Earnshaw in Japan: An analysis of women’s language in the subtitled and dubbed versions of William Wyler's and Mary Soan - Peter Kosminsky’s feature films by Francesco Vitucci.

In the various Japanese versions of William Wyler and Mary Soan - Peter Kosminsky’s feature films, in terms of translation Catherine Earnshaw is often presented with a linguistic identity that indexes a series of stereotypes around which the style of Japanese female language has crystallized. In this work, on the basis of four Japanese versions of the movie Wuthering Heights and starting from contemporary sociolinguistic studies, I will try to highlight how Japanese subtitling and dubbing have contributed - thanks to the mediation of foreign bodies - to converge towards an adaptation strategy with the aim of consolidating gender discrimination which in contemporary Japanese society is still difficult to eradicate.