Pettit, Zoë ORCID: 0000-0002-1909-8947 (2014) A South African take on the gangster film genre: translating Tsotsi and Hijack Stories for an international audience. In: Abend-David, D, (ed.) Media and Translation: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Bloomsbury Academic, New York, pp. 53-72. ISBN 978-1623566463

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Abstract

This chapter investigates the English subtitled version of the South African film, Tsotsi (2005) released in the UK and the USA with the subtitled and dubbed DVD versions released in France. The screenplay draws its inspiration from an Athol Fugard novel (1980), but has been adapted to present day South Africa, depicting life in a sprawling township on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The characters speak Tsotsitaal a mixture of various local African languages, Afrikaans and English. Code-switching is another feature of the original dialogues. Tsotsi is compared to another contemporary South African film set in Soweto, Hijack Stories (2000). The characters generally speak English, although code-switching also features highly. The visual setting and thematic concerns of each of the films are similar. However, there are differences, with a higher frequency of dialogue in Hijack Stories which explores questions surrounding sense of belonging and personal identity in post-apartheid South Africa. Are similar translation strategies employed in both films? To what extent are the resulting translations defined by the signs that make up the audiovisual text? Such questions are explored, taking into account the multimodal nature of the audiovisual text.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	interlingual subtitling and dubbing, multimodality, audiovisual translation, code-switching, register, language variation, South Africa
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > School of Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS) Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > Centre for Research & Enterprise in Linguistics (CREL)
Last Modified:	29 Oct 2021 03:20
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/24014

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