Product placement and screen translation. Transferring references to U.S. brands unknown to other cultural contexts

Abstract

Spoken references to brands are common in American films and sitcoms, allegedly to make dialogues more realistic, but also favored by the fact that major studios have become conglomerate companies which try to maximize profits with indirect advertising. These legal formalities are rarely mentioned in audiovisual translation studies, and this paper will analyze how product placement of American food and beverage brands still trans-nationally unknown are dealt with by Spanish dubbing translators, since they might require some degree of linguistic manipulation to provide equivalent implicatures (Grice, 1975). Following Franco Aixelá’s (1996) taxonomy of translation of culture specific items, absolute universalization is the most widespread strategy, but the erasure of source text dialogues in dubbed productions allows for more daring approaches to replace opaque brands.