A Stranger in the Saloon: Lexical Disruption in the English Translation for Euro-Westerns Dubbing

Abstract

Within the current context of a surge of foreign audiovisual content dubbed into English, the purpose of this article is to analyze how, half a century earlier, a dubbese developed in the translation of Euro-Westerns into English, resulting in a disruption of the established lexis of American Westerns. In order to analyze the root of this phenomenon, a corpus of fifteen American Westerns and their translations for dubbing into Spanish was compiled to understand how the Spanish distinctive lexis of the genre developed between the 1940s and 60s. Then, another parallel corpus of fifteen Euro-Westerns from the 60s and 70s with Spanish scripts and their English translations for dubbing was collected to explore whether the artificially created Spanish dubbese had any linguistic effect by means of its translation into English upon the canonical lexis of American Westerns. Finally, a comparable corpus was derived from the two previous corpora and analyzed. The results show that several distinctive lexical elements used in the corpus of American Westerns were replaced in the Euro-Westerns dubbed into English by terms never used in the original genre due to the influence of foreign scriptwriters. Thus, dubbese can be found in both cultural contexts. At first it was developed in dubbed American Westerns and, eventually, to a lesser degree, in dubbed Euro-Westerns.