Recontextualising foreign-policy acronyms in audiovisual translation: Insights from the Turkish dubbing of an American series The Diplomat

Abstract

This article is centered on a comparative analysis of spoken dialogues containing foreign-policy acronyms in the original Netflix American series The Diplomat and their Turkish dubbing translations. In the first stage, Jorge Díaz Cintas and Aline Remael’s categories and strategies for abbreviations in subtitling have been adopted to demonstrate the transferability of their theoretical insights to the translation of specialised foreign-policy terminology in the dubbing of the series. It should be noted that there exists a notable research gap regarding the translation of acronyms in dubbing -a fact that highlights the necessity for proposing ways of rendering acronyms within the context of dubbing translation. Viewed from this perspective, this study attempts to demonstrate and discuss how Díaz Cintas and Remael’s categories and strategies for translating abbreviations can be applied to dubbing. Finally, selected terms from the dialogues have been studied in the light of Juliane House’s Theory of Translation as Recontextualisation. The reason for selecting this theory lies in the attempt to reveal the translator’s basic orientation, whether an overt or a covert-oriented approach, in House’s terms, has been followed when dealing with foreign-policy acronyms under analysis. In this sense, the series concerned is of great importance for this research, as it abounds with material that contains specialised terminology in foreign-policy, thus providing an ideal basis for analyzing the process of recontextualization of Turkish dubbed dialogues. Most importantly, it has been found that the covert translation approach, coupled with the strategy of adaptation, has been mostly relied on, demonstrating the extent to which the function of foreign-policy acronyms in the series is communicated effectively and recontextualised within a different sociopolitical domain during the dubbing process.