Translating Television in Latin America (with Laurena Bernabo)

In this week’s episode, guest Laurena Bernabo discusses her article “Progressive Television, Translation, and Globalization: The Case of Glee in Latin America” which analyzes the behind-the-scenes production process to dub the TV show Glee into Spanish for Latin American audiences. Bernabo demonstrates how managerial choices, talent availability, and narrative particularities shape the creative decisions for a show’s dubbing. In the specific case of Glee, these creative decisions significantly impact the translation of the show’s attempts at representing various identities, such as gender, race, and sexuality. Bernabo argues for the importance of studying production processes and translated texts together to account for how ideologically rich representations circulate across linguistic and national contexts.

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How to Translate a Genre (with Michelle Cho)

In this week’s episode, guest Michelle Cho discusses her article “Genre, Translation, and Transnational Cinema” which analyzes Kim Jee-woon’s Korean western film The Good, the Bad, the Weird as emblematic of both the transnational adaptation of popular genres and the international rise of South Korean cinema in the early 21st century. Cho proposes a theory of genre translation that does not require audiences to know all textual references in a film and that accounts for the embodied pleasures and therapeutic sensations of globally popular genres, such as westerns.

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