Dubbing’s discursive status. The case of Elite Squad dubbed into French

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the dubbing into French of the movie Elite Squad, by José Padilha (2007). My interest concerns the materiality of the discursive process put into place by the voice of the narrator. Departing from within the field of audiovisual translation, I wish to observe how the alternation between two different ways of introducing voice into a filmic enunciation constitutes a material counterpart of the discourse shift that traverses the act of ascribing another voice to the image of a protagonist. I consider voice as a combination of linguistic expression and prosodic elements that, in terms of syntax, interact with each other and produce a certain elocutive rhythm that directs how meaning is conveyed throughout the film. In order to achieve that, I focus on the narrator's manner of speaking and aim to capture the markers of the vocative used by him, a constant presence in the original that is omitted from the dubbing into French. By dealing with this subject in the movie Elite Squad I intend to show how the prosodic alterations introduced into the dubbing of a movie may reflect a discursive process that fails to be the conveyor of the meanings of the cinematic narrative of the original version.