Translation of Multilingual Films: The Case of Dubbing

There are numerous films that the director or scriptwriter decides to use bilingual characters in them. Moreover, a foreign language may be observed because of shooting a film in a foreign country. In this case, the translator and the dubbing team may face difficulties. The aim of the present study is to examine the translation strategies in multilingual films. To this end, 713 minutes from six films were scrutinized to gather all the third language instances based on Zabalbeascoa and Corrius’s (2014) model. Then, their counterpart translations were extracted from the dubbed versions and classified based on Corrius and Zabalbeascoa’s (2019) model. The results revealed that the third language was maintained in most cases. In this sense, the character’s voice was repeated or the voice actor read the phonological translation. The results could be useful for translator trainees to become familiar with the possible translation strategies in multilingual films. Moreover, further research on this issue can improve dubbing quality, at least at linguistic level. However, further investigations are demanded to have a comprehensive list of possible alternatives for dubbing or subtitling multilingual films.