Photo: Mikko Hietanen
Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Doctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä Tim Reus tells us about his ongoing research in which he makes use of the Kielipankki resource Triangle of Aspects Analysis of Frozen.
I am Tim Reus, a doctoral candidate with the University of Jyväskylä, although I currently live in Vaasa. I’m from the Netherlands, where I did my bachelor’s in English literature and linguistics in Amsterdam and my master’s in translation studies with the University of Leiden. After graduating, I decided I wanted to live abroad for a while, and Finland is a great country for translation studies – and, of course, a very interesting country from a linguistic point of view as well. Since then, I have had the honour of meeting various fantastic researchers in the field, as well as the opportunity to enjoy all those cases the Finnish language has.
I am interested in song dubbing, or more precisely, the dubbing of songs from animated musical films. My dissertation research focuses on the Disney film Frozen, which I use as a case study to test a model I have developed to analyse songs from animated film musicals, the triangle of aspects. Song dubbing is subject to a great variety of constraints, both musical – rhyme, rhythm, singability – and visual – lip synchrony, gestures – as well as, obviously, verbal – meaning and style – and the triangle of aspects provides links between these constraints (or aspects). It is interesting to see how all these aspects were combined in the dubbed versions of the songs from Frozen, which aspects were prioritised over others, and how the treatment of those aspects affects the themes of the film. With the triangle of aspects, I hope to create a model that facilitates a systematic, structured, and, perhaps to some degree, more quantitative comparison of such topics in multiple language versions of a song from animated musical films.
The online discussion data of my study comes from a forum called , My data consists of the original, English-language lyrics of the songs from Frozen and their translation into Dutch, and the analysis according to the triangle of aspects, which looks at ten aspects of such songs (e.g. rhyme, lip synchrony, and meaning). As such, it constitutes a comparison of language material, including linguistic data on the transfer of meaning and style between different languages. The data collected with the triangle of aspects on the songs from Frozen is available in the Language Bank today for use for a variety of translation-related purposes.
Reus, T. (2017). The Many Voices of Elsa and Anna: Introducing the Triangle of Aspects for Animated Musical Film Dubbing. VAKKI Publications, 8(1), 181-192.
Reus, T. (2018). Exploring Skopos in the Dutch Dubbed Versions of the Songs of Disney’s Frozen. New Voices in Translation Studies, 19(1), 1-24.
The FIN-CLARIN consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers in Finland to use, to refine, to preserve and to share their language resources. The Language Bank of Finland is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.
All previously published Language Bank researcher interviews are stored in the Researcher of the Month archive.
