A descriptive analysis of cultural references in the Spanish subtitling and dubbing of Indian cinema

Abstract

This doctoral thesis adopts the research framework of Descriptive Translation Studies to conduct an empirical, bottom-up analysis of Indian cultural references in translation. It is based on a corpus of 14 Indian feature films originally in Bengali, Hindi and English with subtitled and dubbed versions in Spanish. It thus presents an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of coupled pairs of cultural references, examining their various types and the corresponding translation solutions detected. The main research tool consists of an Excel spreadsheet comprising a total of 836 cultural references. The study has a dual objective: firstly, to find out what types of cultural references may be detected in the chosen Indian films and their translated versions, and secondly, to examine the translation solutions adopted in the subtitled and dubbed versions of these references, with the final goal of extrapolating translation norms, or at least, conventions.