María Julia Francés reflected on the role of translators in the current media scene and the challenges they face with the emergence of new technologies.

The adaptation of the iconic Spanish comic El Eternauta, created by screenwriter Héctor Oesterheld and cartoonist Francisco Solano López, has generated a lot of buzz following its release on Netflix. One of the aspects that drew the most attention was its translation, especially due to the number of idioms and cultural connotations present in the work.

“Audiovisual translation has many facets linked to culture, of course. English is usually used as the pivot language: it is not translated directly from one language to another, but rather an intermediary language is often used, and currently, it is predominantly English, because it is a language of power. At one time it was French, at other times it was others. So, there arises the need to replace all that cultural content that the translator of the second part of the process can no longer possess,” explained María Julia Francés, coordinator of the Diploma in Advanced Studies in Theoretical Tools and Techniques Applied to Audiovisual Translation at the University of Barcelona. Universidad Nacional de Rosario.

In this regard, he emphasized that, unlike other words, Malvinas doesn't have a simple linguistic equivalence, but rather carries a political charge. "Malvinas-Falklands is a distinction in political terms. In international documents in English, such as UN declarations, it says Malvinas-Falklands, even though it's in English. It's not that they just say Falklands because it's in English," he explained. 

For her, the choice to translate it simply as Falklands ignores the political dimension of the language. “That seems like a clear mistake to me,” she maintained, recalling that she has even observed this omission in local institutional contexts: “Ten years ago, I went with some friends from the United States on a tour of the Casa Rosada, and the brochures said Falklands. There's a question of not seeing the political aspect of the language.”