On the subtitling of visualised metaphors

Abstract

There has been a great interest in metaphors in translation in recent years, but few scholars have taken into consideration the extra complexities that are involved when translation takes place in audiovisual media. This paper seeks to remedy that, by qualitatively investigating how visualised metaphors in the TV series Yes, Prime Minister, and other audiovisual sources, have been translated into Swedish subtitles. When a metaphor is visualised, the vehicle of the metaphor is visible on screen, and this means that there is ambiguity between the literal and the figurative sense of the metaphor, with one sense coming through one discourse channel and the other coming via another of the discourse channels that makes up the polysemiotic text. This may cause serious translation crisis points and put severe constraints on the options available to the subtitler if unintended intersemiotic tension is to be avoided. This paper puts forward the theories necessary for handling these complexities and also offers some advice as to what strategies can be useful for solving these translation problems. The results indicate that it is a fairly rare translation problem, and one which can often be solved using conventional strategies. However, occasionally, it creates nearly unsolvable obstacles that cannot be solved without intersemiotic tension.