Translating multilingualism in film: A case study on Le concert

The paper sheds some light both on the different ways in which multilingualism may be represented in film and on the difficult task of managing it in translation. A comparative analysis is carried out between the original version of the film Le concert (Radu Mihaileanu, 2009) and the dubbed versions for the French, Italian and Spanish markets as well as the subtitled version for the British market. Different ways to deal with multilingualism are identified: on the one hand, dubbing the film entirely into the target languages by resorting (or not) to "would-be" foreign accents to signal the origin of characters; on the other, some more "innovation" in subtitling to verbally reproduce instances of broken language. The analysis of the different solutions adopted in the four countries leads us to consider the opportunities and limitations that dubbing and subtitling multilingual films may afford.