Literary Translation Studies PhD candidate wins Australasian essay prize
Rory McKenzie, PhD candidate in Literary Translation Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures, has recently been awarded the 2018 Jo-Anne Duggan Prize for Best Essay by the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS), competing with students throughout New Zealand and across the Tasman.
Rory’s essay, ‘A translation stalemate: The Dark Horse in Italian’ draws on work he undertook as part of a Victoria University Summer Scholarship in 2015, when he wrote Italian subtitles for the film The Dark Horse. In 2016 the film was released in Italy, with subtitles produced by the Italian film distributor.
The essay analyses these commercial Italian subtitles, highlighting specific translation choices made by the subtitler when attempting to deal with the cultural and linguistic specificity of the original. Where this specificity is not effectively rendered by the subtitles, Rory provides possible alternatives and improvements that are based on his in-depth knowledge of New Zealand culture.
Rory’s work will be published in a top quartile journal in the field of Italian studies and he will present the paper at the upcoming biennial ACIS conference titled Navigazioni possibili: Italies Lost and Found, which will be hosted by Victoria University in February 2019.
This project has since informed Rory’s Honours research project, undertaken in 2016, where he analysed the translation into English of Italian dialect in a contemporary Italian film, as well as his PhD dissertation in which he looks at ways film humour can be retained across different languages and cultures given the constraints of subtitling.