Cinéma d'Auteur and Dubbing: the Woody Allen paradox

Abstract

Dubbing is the most common audiovisual translation technique in France but very few scientific studies have been conducted on the subject. Several factors may explain it: the difficulty in understanding oral speech, the cultural devaluation of a mode of translation initiated by the American studios to target the masses, or the impossibility of assigning an author to a production resulting from a collective chain of intervening parties. Nonetheless, a Cinéma d’auteur exists, very often far from Hollywood studios, and thus quite rare in the American film system. Woody Allen, an American director independent from the Majors, is a unique example of this phenomenon: he has managed to preserve his artistic autonomy while using international distribution channels. They have brought him a real fame in France, thanks to subtitled and dubbed versions of his films.

Cinéma d’auteur and dubbing can however be regarded as antinomous as the former is supposed to address an elite and the latter is ontologically tied to mass media. The “Frenchification” of Allen’s films lies at the very heart of that paradox and demands a balance between two poles, one leading towards the author’s speech, and the other towards the facilitation of the spectator’s work. The thesis seeks to understand how dubbing has to negotiate the contradictions at the very heart of this situation, and what room is ascribed to the author in the dubbed versions, between the Model Author and Addressee as defined by the reception theories. These theories and the concept of Cinéma d'auteur are introduced in the first part, to contextualize the research, before presenting Allen's works, the corpus chosen and its reception in the American and French areas, in a second part.

Based on more than 220 examples taken from nine of Allen’s comedies, extending over a 30- year period from 1972 to 2002, a diachronic and comparative study follows, based on the descriptive translation theories, contrasting the original versions of the films with their translations in French editions and their dubbed versions transcribed from DVDs, and using Berman’s theory of “deforming tendencies”. This is divided into two parts, one concerning the translation of culture, subdivided into two chapters: onomastic referents and loanwords, the other dealing with the translation of orality, which includes chapters about the different speech registers, concerned with the translation of slang, taboo words, interjections and appellatives, and a final chapter studies the translation of humor, with puns and irony, two features well known by Woody Allen's audiences.

The thesis concludes on the resolution of the "Woody Allen paradox", achieved through the specific reception process of his films by the French-speaking audiences: they are apprehended as textual and narrative strategies, conforming to the image of the Model and Pragmatic Author built by Woody Allen over the years. Dubbing and Cinema d'auteur thus form a functional couple, thanks to a mediating process where the translators-adaptators have taken full responsibility as co-authors of the dubbed French versions.