Reclaiming Rio: Iconization and erasure of American English in the Brazilian Portuguese dubbing of an animated film

Abstract

This article draws on Irvine and Gal’s semiotic processes of iconization and erasure of language differentiation to analyse and compare the English language original and Brazilian Portuguese dubbed version of the animated film Rio. Three scenes depicting cross-linguistic encounters between American English- and Brazilian Portuguese-speaking characters are studied to see how screen translators approach situations in which the linguistic other in a source text is portrayed by a language that coincides with the target language. The case study draws on translational strategies proposed by Zabalbeascoa and Corrius. Viewed from the perspective of semiotic processes of language differentiation, these strategies have a striking effect: whereas mainstream Hollywood films tend to portray multilingual situations and the non-English-speaking linguistic other by iconization and erasure, once the film is dubbed, it is American English identities that are iconized and later disappear from the screen.

Key words:

• multilingualism
• audiovisual translation
• language ideology
• erasure
• linguistic other

Notes on contributors

Peter Petrucci teaches courses in language and communication, mediated communication, and forensic linguistics at Massey University in New Zealand. His research interests concern the sociolinguistics of screen translation, language use and language awareness on the Internet, and transnational discourses online.

Notes

1. I’d like to thank Rafael Cardoso, Nancy Antrim, Martin Paviour-Smith, and the peer reviewers of this journal for their valuable comments. Any inaccuracies or errors in this article are my responsibility.

2. See Marsh (2012) for an interesting discussion of the cultural characteristics of the main and secondary American and Brazilian roles in the film.

3. All translations for this and the following extracts are my own. ‘Unchanged’ = untranslated Brazilian Portuguese lines of dialogue from the original production that remain unchanged in the dubbed production; … = material that has been elided for the purposes of brevity; BP = Brazilian Portuguese.

4. In the Brazilian Portuguese version of the film, Jewel has been given the name Jade.

5. Later in the scene, Linda asks the samba school director to speak English. In the Brazilian Portuguese version, Linda’s reference to English is erased via L1 + L3^TT à L2.