Film Translation with Special Reference to Stylistic and Cultural Aspects

Today there is a vast diversity of means of cross-cultural communication, which is only a part of the globalisation process in almost every sphere of life. The cultural environment reflected in a film is closely interlinked with particular stylistic patterns dominating in a certain society. Thus, stylistics is a mean of representing the features, values, traditions, as well as topical issues of the cultural group in question.
Films are one of the media fostering cross-cultural interaction and exchange of different cultural values and unique characteristics between societies all around the world. Since films may reflect historically, geographically, ethnically, culturally, stylistically etc. determined features which are characteristic (only) for a particular society, a question may arise – what is the actual role of the film translation in conveying the original message to a completely or partially different cultural environment which is constituted from different historical background.
In such kind of translation not only the knowledge of the audience must be taken into account, but also the translation, which may be quite helpful in understanding the film contents in all its complicity, or the other way round – a poor translation may spoil the whole idea and intentions of the author by misinterpreting and losing significant cultural and stylistic devices. The role of translator in cross-cultural communication is characterised by Lawrence Venuti (1998, p 4):
The only prestige that a translator can gain comes from practising translation, not as a form of personal expression, but as a collaboration between divergent groups, motivated by an acknowledgement of the linguistic and cultural differences that translation necessarily rewrites and reorders. …