THE USE OF “MEXICANISMOS” IN DUBBING AND SUBTITLING

"-¿Qué onda, carnal? -¿Qué rollo, cómo andas?- Pues ahí la llevo, con mucha chamba, ¿y tú? - Pues dos que tres de chamba, no me quejo, la neta." This is a conversation less formal where it’s used certain type of expressions that we call “mexicanismos”. Gómez De Silva (2001) in his Brief Dictionary of mexicanismos defines it as a word or locution from Spanish origin or indigenous which it’s characteristic from Mexican spanish, and allows to place between them voices from Mexican origin incorporated in spanish in general. But what happen when these expressions appear in movies and are translated in other language?

Nowadays some Mexican movies like “Y tu mamá también” (2001), “Amores perros” (2000) and “Rudo y Cursi” (2008), just to mention, have been recognized abroad because of Mexican folklore in the vocabulary. These characteristic features of our country have seen the light intensely in cinema and for many years began to dominate the industry of dubbing and subtitling in North - American cinemas. Also these particular expressions of our country are being seriously affected when they get into the phenomenon that Cucco (2010) call “cultural discount”, which consists in the loss of value and attractiveness of a product when it’s taken into a cultural system different than the native, the original, from where it was made and produced, and in the case of movies they face some problems of understanding contents, cultural adaptation or lack of identification with the characters and situations because they considerate them beyond the reality they live. This cultural discount try to decrease through the process of dubbing and subtitling of the films, changing in this way the national work of a country into transnational.

There is a process that consists in adapting the oral original texts of a movie without letting out essential information for the understanding of an audience, this procedure is called “condensation subtitles”, where its unavoidable a loss of information. Additionally the texts of subtitles omit some characteristics like the intonation and idiosyncratic vocal characteristics. Furthermore it’s complicated to translate the double sense exclusive from the native language.

In the case of dubbing, the main problem that faces is to synchronize the lip movement of the original actors with the recordings of artists dubbing, which is impossible to make perfect. Some possible advantages dubbing provides is that public can feel identified more easily when they hear their native language on screen.