Dubbing, subtitling and other lesser evils

One of the aims contemplated in Law 1/2014, of 24 March, on the use of the Portuguese language and Ties with Lusophony, popularly known as the Paz Andrade Law, was for Galician Television to promote the exchange of audiovisual productions and collaborate in the creation of new projects. One of the few fruits of this Law is the co-production Vidago Palace, a miniseries set in 1936, with scenes filmed on both sides of the Galician-Portuguese border and in which the public broadcasters Radiotelevisão Portuguesa (RTP) and Televisión de Galicia (TVG) participate financially. Filmed in Portuguese and Galician, it was shown in two versions: original version with subtitles in Galician for the Portuguese public broadcaster and dubbed in Galician for the Galician public broadcaster. As well as the usual practices involved in subtitling and dubbing for both broadcasters, the dual version offers a series of linguistic peculiarities. This paper analyses both in order to reveal the policies that the abovementioned broadcasters apply to a multilingual product, paying particular attention to the uses of Galician, as a minority language, in this fiction television programme. As a result, this research can conclude that the minority language, Galician, is minoritized due to a coproduction which prioritizes intelligibility for the target audience in Portuguese and creates a false multilingual version which cannot be noticed in the dubbed version screened in Galician.

The proposal materialises within the scope of the research programme “EU-VOS. Intangible Cultural Heritage. For a European Programme for Subtitling in Non-Hegemonic Languages”, financed by the National Programme for Research Aimed at the Challenges of Society (AEI. Ref. CSO2016-76014-R) and ERDF funds.