Translation problems in the translation of two film versions of Alice in Wonderland into Spanish. A cognitive-pragmatic approach

Abstract

When a given text is lo be rendered in a different language, there are normally certain translation problems associated with language and culture that the translalor will have to face and find a solution to. In those cases in which the source text is an audiovisual text, those problems become more complex, as very often the relation between image and language will have to be taken into account. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the strategies used by the translators to tackle translation problems such as the translation of puns or the translation of cultural references in the Spanish sublitled and dubbed versions of two films based on Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The two films referred to are Tim Burton's (2010) Alice in Wonderland and the animated film with the same title directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamillon Luske in 1951, both of them produced by Walt Disney Pictures. The approach adopted in this study is a cognitive-pragmatic one. More specifically, Sperber and Wilson's (1986/1995) Relevance Theory has been used as the theoretical framework of this study. According to Relevance Theory, the relation between a translation and its source text is considered to be based on interpretive resemblance, rather than on equivalence (See Gutt 1998, 2000). The translator would try to seek optimal relevance, in such a way that s/he would use different strategies to try to recreate the cognitive effects intended by the source communicator with the lowest possible processing effort on the part of the target addressee.