Hayes, Lydia Mary Ellen; (2024) Game of Memes: Accents in Original and Dubbed Versions. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Accents are inextricably linked to cultural identities. Their composition of phonetic, phonological, and suprasegmental characteristics is an echo of the geographic locations where different accents find their origins. Nevertheless, the links an individual or a society might draw between a speaker and their accent are not merely diatopic, but might also be diastratic, idiosyncratic, ethnic, or diachronic. This complexity in cultural connotation that is inherent in accent owes to the fact that communities of speakers index different accents, and language varieties more generally, with cultural value, thereby creating social personae. In Sociolinguistics, this process is called “enregisterment”. The utterance of accent, therefore, can convey a series of connotations in relation to a speaker when the accent is perceived by another. For this reason, accents can be conceptualised as units of cultural transmission, referred to in Sociobiology as “memes”. Given that dialogues are ubiquitous in audiovisual texts, it comes as no surprise that accents are harnessed by actors and actresses to forge their characters’ identities. Each language community possesses a unique set of accents and associated cultural identities and whereas the connotations pertaining to two accents from different languages might resemble one another, the community of speakers represented by an accent is fundamentally unique. When it comes to dubbing audiovisual fiction into another language, there are many ideological conundrums to face, but there are also factors such as technical constraints, industry conventions and viewer expectations, which dictate the translation strategies employed to convey accent-related meaning. In this thesis, I devise a theoretical framework for analysing accents in original and dubbed versions, exploring the Castilian-Spanish dubbing industry through the lens of the series Game of Thrones and its dubbed version in Spain. My corpus analysis is complemented by insight provided by industry practitioners who were involved in the production and localisation of the selected series.

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