Intertextual college in the voice-over translation of American feature films into Luganda: the case of ''Firimu enjogerere''

Abstract

This study examines voice-over translation of American feature films into Luganda as film adaptation which involves the adaptation from film into an oral performance dubbed Firimu Enjogerere. The study therefore runs along three strands namely translation, adaptation and orature. First of all it is translation because the voice-over artiste known as the Video Jockey (VJ) renders his own interpretation of the mise-en-scene, action, dialogue and the sounds of an exotic film in Luganda a local language. Secondly, Firimu Enjogerere is adaptation because the aptly named Video Jockey rides on the above mentioned elements of the original film to create his/her own narrative in the new text which becomes a hybrid of Luganda orature and film narrative.Thirdly Firimu Enjogerere is orature because the Video Jockey transcends the traditional notion of Audio-Visual Translation (AVT) by performing orally before an audience that is, to a great extent, more interested in the oral performance than the source film itself. The study has adopted the term orature which was coined by Ugandan poet/playwright/author Pio Zirimu in a ''rejection'' of the term oral literature( Ngugi:2007). The study finds its rationale in two schools of thought namely; the reader response approach to literary criticism whose guiding principle is that the reader/recipient of a literary text brings their world view to its interpretation. Secondly, the view in narratology, advanced by scholar Gerard Gennette, that a narrative is a composition of two distinct aspects; the story itself and the act of telling it. In this study the source film is the story that is retold in an oral performance by the Video Jockey. These theories account for the Video Jockey's act of interpretation/adaptation and creation of a parallel or an alternative narrative to that of the ante-text. The study regards the ante-text as the story whose telling has been supplanted by the Video Jockey's narration in what becomes the adaptation. For analysis, the study uses two Firimu Enjogerere texts by Video Jockey Kizito Tabula Ssalongo A.K.A. VJ Jingo namely: Baz Lurhmann's Romeo+Juliet (1996) and Victor Salva's thriller Dark House (2014). The study relies on the work of African oral literature scholar Ruth Finnegan to demonstrate that these two adaptations are indeed works of orature. In the notion that orature is not confined to traditional forms alone the study finds support in the view of scholars Russell Kaschula and Andre Mostert (2011) that orature has merged or embraced modem technology in its nature and dissemination. (I) As regards adaptation the dissertation deploys the theories of a number of film adaptation scholars. Kamilla Elliot (2003) who believes that the content of a text can split from its form to emerge in another form and suggests that images. like words. are translatable proposes six configurations in which a source text can manifest in its adaptation. The study mainly utilizes two of these namely; the trumping and ventriloquist modes of adaptation and bases on them to describe the way VJ Jingo supplants and alters the elements in his adaptation of Baz Lurhmann's Romeo+Juliet (1996). Additionally Kamilla Elliot's concept of a pychic mode of adaptation is used to describe the way VJ Jingo captures what can be described as the spirit of Victor Salva' s Dark House (2014). The study also appropriates Thomas Leitch's description of a curatorial adaptation in the analysis of V 1 Jingo's rendering of Victor Salva's Dark House (2014 ). The study also incorporates the typology and nomenclature of Gerard Gennette's trans textuality as well as Robert Starn ·s (2000) view of adaptation as a conversation between two texts in his "Dialogies of adaptation" (54 to 75). to describe the phenomenon of hybridity in Firimu Enjogerere.