Translation and the Myth of Universal Cinema

This volume serves to question the long-standing claim of the universality of film from the perspective of translation. Through a strategic analysis of the role of subtitles and dubbing in the industry, the book discusses how film translation has been instrumentalized to expand mainstream film’s universalist agenda.

The book engages in a critical discussion of the state-of-the-art of audiovisual translation, using it as a jumping-off point to explore the idea of film as translational space and the translation process as a film-transformative practice. Exploring such issues as subtitling, dubbing, and the representation of translation and translators on film in a range of case studies, the volume demonstrates how the two disciplines are anchored in a common goal of universal appeal, rooted in aesthetics of Western modernity, and work in concert to serve or defy that goal. Across the book’s four chapters the critical translational perspective is employed to revisit classic texts by Christian Metz, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Miriam Hansen, David Bordwell and Slavoj Žižek, and to propose detailed analysis of films by Ingmar Bergman, Abbas Kiarostami, and Denis Villeneuve.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in translation studies, film studies, comparative literature, and continental philosophy.

Author Biography

Dionysios Kapsaskis is an Associate Professor at the University of Roehampton, London. He is co-editor (with E. Bielsa) of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization (2021).