Bio

Craig Neville is a PhD candidate and CACSSS Excellence Scholar in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University College Cork under the supervision of Dr Helena Buffery. His areas of interest in academia centre around the sociolinguistic and cultural importance of language in minority language communities (particularly those of Iberia) and the role that translation and the media has in this venture. He is also interested in the applications of corpus-based approaches in the analysis of language to understand how national discourses are reflected within it.

Craig is a UK-qualified secondary school teacher (French and Spanish) and, before embarking on his PhD, was Assistant Head of Modern Foreign Languages and joint-coordinator of Teaching and Learning in secondary education in the UK for 10 years. He has also held positions of responsibility pertaining to the professional and subject knowledge development of trainee teachers enrolled in PGCEs, Schools Direct and the Return to Teaching Programme.  Outside of the classroom, Craig is interested in the teaching of Modern Foreign Languages at primary, secondary and third-level education and hopes to explore ways in which effective pedagogies can be shared more widely throughout the teaching community to foster more consistency and progression.

PhD Project Description

To what extent has the role of dubbing historically contributed to the promotion of Galician and Catalan sociolinguistic identity since the 1980s? A diachronic, corpus-based approach

Abstract

For some, dubbing is considered a form of censorship; for others a cultural outlet that challenges the status quo. This comparative study of dubbing output from Galicia and Catalonia since the achievement of regional autonomy is testament to the latter. Recent descriptive studies of audiovisual output have focused almost entirely on linguistic features of dubbed texts sourced from similar time periods. The approach here draws on some of these existing methodologies but combines them with insights from recent scholarship in translation history and Critical Discourse Analysis to demonstrate the value gained from analysing both qualitatively and quantitatively, comparatively and diachronically, how the choices made in the translation of cultural referents in combination with the use of certain linguistic features can promote a particular sociolinguistic and cultural ideology. Here, the opportunity to compare the evolution of practice over a period of over 30 years will offer invaluable insights into the changing priorities of language planning and their impact on the relationship between language and identity in each region. The data for this project will be drawn from the GalCat Catalogue – an online database that will be created as part of this project– of all instances of audiovisual material dubbed from English that have been broadcast on regional television in Catalonia and Galicia. Appropriate texts will be chosen from key periods of social and political change and aligned to form a diachronic, comparable corpus of source and target texts: the first of its kind. These texts will be tagged using XML so that they can be uploaded to a web-based database with a specifically designed search engine to allow end-users to query the data. The results of the analysis not only reveal undiscussed features of the dubbing industry in both regions but also provide empirical evidence of the evolving focus of language planning policies.