Dominique Pelletier, Alex Gauthier, Mona Sacui Catrinescu

Lost in Karastan: The translation and non-translation of disorientation in a fictional land

The film Lost in Karastan is a black comedy and satire of the post-Soviet world in which Emil Forester, a washed-up independent filmmaker, finds himself in Karastan, completely disoriented. Our presentation will focus on the approach we took to subtitling this film from English into French, which involved not translating the foreign-language passages (in Russian and Karastani) in order to recreate for the audience the protagonist’s sense of disorientation. The Autonomous Republic of Karastan is in fact a fictional country where the people speak Karastani, a fictional language invented by the director Ben Hopkins. The figure of the interpreter as cultural mediator is very present in the film and serves to make the non-translated passages partially comprehensible. Our case study will explore relationships between fictional culture and reality, and between humour, translation and non-translation.

Keywords: subtitling, non-translation, fictional culture

Biographies

Dominique Pelletier is a Doctoral Candidate in Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa and Part-time Instructor of Translation at Concordia University. She holds an MA in Translation Studies from Concordia University and a BA in Translation from the Université de Montréal. She has undertaken extensive research on terminology, and her socio-historical approach integrates a broad range of perspectives, including linguistics, terminology, translation studies, literary translation, and translation history. As a practising translator, she specializes in audiovisual translation.

Alex Gauthier is a Master’s Candidate in Translation Studies in the Department of French Studies at Concordia University. He holds a BA in Translation from the same university. He participated in the Voyages in Translation Studies conference at Concordia University in 2014, and, as acting President of the Concordia Graduate Students Association in Translation, was one of the principal organizers of the 2015 student conference. His research draws on the theories of Henri Meschonnic and Applied Linguistics to analyze the translation of sociolects, particularly from Scottish into Québécois French.

Mona Sacui Catrinescu holds a Master’s Degree in Translation Studies from Concordia University. Her research, which was also the subject of her master’s thesis, focuses on the relationship between writing and translation as well as the potential differences between the author-translator and the conventional literary translator. As a practising translator, she specializes in sub-titling, advertising adaptation, and literary translation. As a writer, she is currently working on a Surrealist war novel.