Creativity and Alterity in Film Translation: A Return to Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to revisit a number of concepts outlined in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1813 Academy address Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens and other writings by him, and link them to film subtitling. It is not our aim to retrace the passage of Schleiermacher’s concepts between languages and theoreticians who gave them new life in the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century; instead, we return to Schleiermacher’s text itself and focus on the translator’s creativity with respect to cultural identity and alterity. Our theoretical reflections inspired by Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics are complemented by the case study of a contemporary Romanian film, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), and its French and English DVD subtitles. We examine some of the challenges involved, and the choices made by the subtitlers in view of presenting to Western audiences a cultural product from Eastern Europe, the continent’s internal other. This leads us to a number of considerations about Schleiermacher and film, especially in relation to ‘die feinste Linie’ (‘the finest line’) between identity and alterity, which is reconfigured through the various degrees of the translator’s creative decision-making.