Book review. Through the Dubbing Glass: The Synchronization of American Motion Pictures into German, French and Spanish. Bern-Berlin-Frankfurt / M-New York-Paris-Wien: Peter Lang, 1992. 341 pp. ISBN 3-631-44751-5. ISSN 0721-3387 (European University Studies, Series XIV: Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, 251).
Table of contents
Through the Dubbing Glass consists of two parts. Part one, Chapters I to VII, deals with the basic principles of the dubbing process generally, with an aside about film title translating in Chapter VII. The analysis presented is based on the on-site observations Whitman made in the dubbing studios of Berlin, Paris and Barcelona, where she witnessed the synchronisation of the 1989 Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors. The German, French and Spanish dubbed versions of this particular film also provide the material for part two, Chapters VIII to XII, in which Whitman gives a "linguistic evaluation" (p. 15) of the dubbed target films. In this section she sets out to discuss issues of lexis, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and register fluctuations. Her interest, so she claims, is not so much in the translation errors as in the linguistic trends that can be detected in them. The linguistic analysis is preceded by a brief introduction to the work of director Woody Allen and the film under discussion.
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