O’Connell, E.M.T. (2003): Minority Language Dubbing for Children: Screen Translation from German to Irish, Bern, Peter Lang, 211 p.

This is a description of the considerations bearing on the dubbing of two series of German children’s programs into Irish. It is also a critique of the translations underlying the dubbing in question. The original German (animated) television cartoon series both bore the title Janoschs Traumstunde, based on the work of Horst Eckert, a well known and widely translated author, whose pen name, at least for his numerous children’s stories, is Janosch. The corpus for the study under review was composed of six of the original German programs and the Irish versions of each of them. The first chapter, “Irish as a Minority Language” (pp. 33-63), recounts the external history of the Irish language in modern times and describes its present status. The author seems to take the position that Irish, though it is learned mainly in school, is a “Low” language in a diglossic relationship which is threatening to degenerate into language shift in favour of English (p. 43). We will be obliged to return to this status question. Chapters Two and Three (“Dubbing,” pp. 65-76, and “Synchrony,” pp. 77-99) deal with technical aspects of “revoicing,” the general term adopted by the author (p. 65) for four techniques: voice-over, narration, free commentary and lip-sync dubbing. This last is the technique used in the present corpus, a fact which leads the author to explain the types of synchrony required between the (moving) picture originally recorded and the audio script of the translation, which must “match” the movements of the characters, both articulatory and gestual, as well as other visual features of the film. She also evaluates the importance of these different types of synchrony in dubbing generally. Since the articulation of animated cartoon characters is not observable in as much detail as that of human television or film actors, however, the author does not criticize the dubbing of her corpus from this standpoint. In fact, she does not criticize the dubbing as such, regarding it as “highly professional” (p. 76). Dubbing enters into her critique only insofar as she suspects that considerations of synchrony may have influenced certain parts of the Irish translation which was the input to the dubbing. It is the nature of this translation that is the real focus here. Thus Chapter Four deals with “Translating for Children” (pp. 101-121) and Chapter Five (pp. 123-186) presents the target of her critique: “Lexical Simplification.” The main criticism of the translations underlying the dubbing of this series of children’s programs is the loss of information from the original German script, especially through choices within the target language lexicon (p. 28 and Chapter Five). In the author’s view, speakers of Irish, and above all native speakers (especially the children, of course), should have been offered a richer and more challenging translation than that underlying the dubbed audio of these programs. More particularly, she says that the Irish version lost information from the original German script by the translating not only of specific terms by more general ones, but unusual words by common ones; it lost the humour generated in the German original by incongruous combinations of terms; it lost the allusions that adults, adolescents and older children would appreciate (e.g., to traditional children’s stories); it lost the lexical cohesion obtained in the original by successions of associated terms; and finally, it sacrificed translation fidelity to certain types of synchrony which are irrelevant in the animation context. The probable reason for “simplification,” which is the author’s most general diagnosis of inadequacies she finds in the translation, is not far to seek. In the late 1980’s, the International Journal of the Sociology …