Media Across Borders

Localising TV, Film and Video Games

Andrea Esser, Iain Robert Smith, Miguel Á. Bernal-Merino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317610786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

What happened when Sesame Street and Big Brother were adapted for African audiences? Or when video games Final Fantasy and Assassins' Creed were localized for the Spanish market? Or when Sherlock Holmes was transformed into a talking dog for the Japanese animation Sherlock Hound? Bringing together leading international scholars working on localization in television, film and video games, Media Across Borders is a pioneering study of the myriad ways in which media content is adapted for different markets and across cultural borders. Contributors examine significant localization trends and practices such as: audiovisual translation and transcreation, dubbing and subtitling, international franchising, film remakes, TV format adaptation and video game localization. Drawing together insights from across the audiovisual sector, this volume provides a number of innovative models for interrogating the international flow of media. By paying specific attention to the diverse ways in which cultural products are adapted across markets, this collection offers important new perspectives and theoretical frameworks for studying localization processes in the audiovisual sector.

For further resources, please see the Media Across Borders group website (www.mediaacrossborders.com), which hosts a 'localization'
bibliography; links to relevant companies, institutions and publications, as well as conference papers and workshop summaries.

1 Defining ‘the Local’ in Localization or ‘Adapting for Whom?’

Andrea Esser

This chapter aims to enhance our understanding of ‘the local’ in localization. It looks at how audiences are constructed by broadcasters and considers the appeal, the consumption, and the reception of ‘locally’ adapted audiovisual entertainment. The chapter was prompted by findings from interviews with format producers and broadcasters (Esser, 2013, 2014; Ndlela, 2012, 2013), textual analysis of TV program adaptations (Jensen, 2009, 2012; Barra, 2009), and a number of qualitative and quantitative audience research projects (Kuipers and de Kloet, 2009; Klaus and O’Connor, 2010; Stehling, 2013; Esser, Keinonen, Jensen, and Lemor, 2016). All raised questions and doubts about the commonly unspecified use of the term and the widespread underlying assumption that formatted television programs, like Big Brother or Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, which are sold internationally for local adaptation, are localized for a national audience.

The reflections offered are furthermore inspired by theoretical arguments advanced by globalization theorists (Appadurai, 1996; Beck, 2006; Hannerz, 1996; Robertson, 1994, 2014; Tomlinson, 1991, 1999) and scholars with a specific interest in transnational media consumption and diasporic audiences (Aksoy and Robins, 2008; Harindranath, 2005; Athique, 2008, 2011; Kuipers and de Kloet, 2009; Robins, 2014a, 2014b). These arguments—whilst coming from such diverse fields as sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and media and film studies—all question, on epistemological and political grounds, conceptualizations of national/ethnic culture and the attendant notion of cultural difference. Harindranath (2005), Aksoy and Robins (2008), and Athique (2011) contend such notions are the result of the extensive and abiding ideological work undertaken to create national cultures and identities. As such they are extremely powerful and persistent, but they also create methodological and theoretical gaps and obstruct understanding, new insights, and avenues of research.

There is a dissonance between the findings of the above-mentioned empirical studies and theories based on notions of ‘national culture’, ‘cultural difference’, and the resulting assumption that adaptation is carried out mainly to take account of ‘national sensibilities’. Furthermore, there is an unresolved, irrefutable clash between these latter theories and the people refuting them and calling for non-identitarian and communitarian conceptualizations of audiences instead, like Harindranath, Athique, and Aksoy and Robins. These important frictions raise questions that are highly relevant to localization research: Who belongs (or does not belong) to the ‘local audience’ that media content is to be adapted for? What are the aspects of ‘local’ization we should consider when adapting audiovisual content for ‘local’ audiences? And which concepts and theoretical perspectives require refinement?

To explore these questions I will draw particularly on TV Format adaptation. It is here that the local is most often equated with the national (see, for example, Moran, 2005; Beeden and de Bruin, 2009; Negra, Pike, and Radley, 2012; Moran and Aveyard, 2014; Keinonen, 2015), and it is the nation-centric thinking in particular I want to challenge in this chapter. But literature from film and video games studies, as well as television studies more generally, suggests that scholars here, too, tend to take ‘national markets’ and ‘national audiences’ for granted. It seems in all these disciplines that only a minority grapple with questions of how and how not to conceptualize media audiences and markets in a globalizing world.

In the first section, I will summarize the theoretical basis of my thinking, addressing the yet-prevalent assumption underlying much television scholarship that the local is bound to territory and that the TV audience is (still) defined by national culture and state borders. The second section will illuminate these abstract ideas with concrete examples from the perspective of broadcasters and format producers. That is, how do industry executives conceptualize their audiences when ‘local’izing an internationally franchised show? In the third section, the nation-centric fallacy will be revealed through a range of audience research projects, all demonstrating that audiences of TV formats are on the one hand comprised of diverse, fluid, and multiple factions of a country’s television market and on the other are much more transnational than TV scholars commonly assume.

In the final section, the widely accepted and cited theses of ‘cultural discount’ (Hoskins and Mirus, 1988) and ‘preference for the local’ (Straubhaar, 1991, 2007) will be critically scrutinized. It will be argued that the persistent and unquestioned dominance of these theories is the result not just of empirical findings but, importantly, of deeply engrained cultural essentialism, where space-based conceptualizations of place and the national imaginary reign. Just as empirical proof exists to suggest a preference for local content, there is also much evidence for the appeal of the foreign, the exotic, for what is perceived as ‘global popular culture’, as new and innovative, and/or simply as of better quality. What is in fact a highly complex picture, I contend, has been obstructed by the plausibility, catchiness, and part-truth of the ‘cultural discount’ and ‘preference for the local’ theses.

Overall, I hope with this chapter to open up avenues for more nuanced thinking and for research that takes into account the immense diversity, plurality, complexity, and fluidity we find in today’s media consumption and reception. For practitioners working in localization this means that approaches to ‘local’ization will become more intricate and varied and that localization strategies should be carefully mapped out on a case-by-case basis.

Theorizing National Culture and Cultural Identity

In their seminal work of the early 1980s Anderson and Hobsbawm argued that we should conceive of national culture not in essentialist terms but as something socially or culturally constructed, ‘imagined’ (Anderson, 1983) and ‘invented’ (Hobsbawm, 1983). Hall (1990) subsequently noted that cultures constantly change and are hybrid at any point in time. With specific reference to geography, Tomlinson (1991, 1999) astutely remarked “[c]ulture is entirely—even definitively—the work of human beings” and thus cannot, like flora and fauna, “naturally belong” to a geographical area (1991: 23). Tomlinson, Hannerz (1996), and Massey (1994) in particular queried space as a marker of culture and as the key element in the construction of ‘place’—here understood as a unique community, landscape, and moral order, creating identity and a sense of belonging.¹ In other words, they were not convinced that people who occupy a particular space together—be it a pub, a city, or a country—all experience this space in the same way, feel the same, identify with each other. At the same time, people who live hundreds of miles apart from each other can feel a great togetherness, religion being a good example.

Of course people can also feel they belong to more than one group, which made Hannerz conclude that if people can belong to “differently distributed communities of intelligibility with regard to different kinds of meaningful forms”, the notion of a bounded culture “as a self-evident package deal, with a definite spatial location” (1996: 21–22) becomes questionable. Massey therefore proposed an alternative interpretation of place as “articulated moments in networks of social relations and understanding” (1994: 154). Places, she argued, need to be conceptualized as processes, not as something frozen in time. Processes, however, cannot easily be bounded, divided off into simple enclosures. Boundaries may be needed at times for research purposes, but this does not mean they are necessary for the conceptualization of place (ibid: 155). Furthermore, Massey argued, we must acknowledge that places do not have single unique identities but are full of internal conflicts. None of this, she convincingly concluded, denies the importance of place. In short, place is what provides us with identification and feelings of belonging but unlike space, which has a geographical aspect, place is unbounded and fluid and can be entirely virtual.

In addition to these important epistemological insights, contemporary trends imply that retaining ‘national culture’ as the key analytical unit and outlook is even more problematic today than it already was in the past, due to its implications of space and fixedness. Appadurai (1996) rightly noted how accelerating globalization during the last four decades has put further pressure on the national. Transnational flows of people, technology, finance, media images, and ideologies, he argued, make it ever harder to pinpoint national cultures and identities. Robertson (1994, 2014) astutely pointed out how the market is actively engaged in constructing and advocating cultural difference, as this is what drives sales and profits. The market, Hannerz (1996) mused, seems to have become more powerful than the state when it comes to managing culture; and international marketing scholars Rittenhofer and Nielsen (2009) contend that in today’s globalizing world it is producers and consumers (not states) who create markets (see chapters from Chaume, Bernal-Merino, Costales, Denison, and Ndlela in this collection). These markets are ever shifting, they rightly note, and differ from product to product. The traditional standard equation of (both producer and consumer) markets with countries does not fit the reality of today’s world.

Focusing on media audiences specifically, important insights have come out of media diaspora research and its proposed shortcomings. Aksoy and Robins (2008), Robins (2014a, 2014b), and Athique (2008, 2011) warn against the prevalent tendency within diaspora studies to engage in the rhetoric of cultural essentialism and consequently turn diaspora into a site of reductive classifications and cultural homogenization. From the perspective of mainstream diaspora studies, Robins remarks critically, the media consumption of a young Turk living in Germany is approached and analyzed on the basis of her assumed ‘essential Turkishness’. As a result of this, it is further assumed that she must have an identity crisis, caught between the norms and demands of ‘her’ culture (i.e., the ‘Turkish’ culture of her parents and grandparents) and the ‘German’ culture she currently resides in. Her media consumption of Turkish television programs or music is then interpreted as causing ‘acculturation stress’ and/or as evidence of her ‘essential Turkishness’ (Robins, 2014a: 29). What we have here, Robins rightly notes, is a reductive and circular argument, an argument that does not constitute sociology but rather mythology. “For, in reality, the considerable differences within ‘the community’ are perhaps more evident and significant than assumed commonalities” (ibid: 28). He refers to both the assumed ‘Turkish’ and ‘German’ communities here.

Cultural essentialism is not just a problem in diaspora studies, though. As Harindranath shows, proponents of media imperialism theories and their opponents, interested in audience reception, too, fall prey to “cultural nationalism riding on conceptions of a putative national culture” (2005), ignoring the vexed question of what constitutes a culture. In both discourses, he says, cultural difference is privileged as an immutable, defining, and essential category of presumed difference, wrongly and dangerously collapsing race/ethnicity/nationality into culture. In contrast, all the above authors call for the recognition of unique and complex cultural experiences. Leaving these highly important but abstract lines of thought, I now want to turn to more illustrative and television-specific arguments about why, when it comes to television consumption and reception, we also need to make greater efforts to recognize complexity. Why assumptions of a ‘national TV audience’, despite various historically grown and at times still evident justifications, are also problematic.

The ‘Local’ Television Audience—Defined by State Borders?

Historically, television in most of the world is nationally determined. In Europe, the stronghold of public-service broadcasting with its remit to reflect and build the nation, this is especially true. Public-service broadcasters were set up to produce television content for the nation, and to address audiences as national citizens. Media policy has been and to a considerable extent still is nationally and/or state oriented, and broadcast rights are historically traded on a country-by-country basis. Audiences’ viewing habits and expectations have been shaped over decades by national terrestrial broadcasters, and industry executives use the nation label for marketing purposes at international TV markets, speaking of ‘Danish drama’, ‘Israeli or British formats’, or ‘Japanese animation’. All of this is the result of the abiding ideological work undertaken to create and sustain national cultures and identities, and it may hence not be surprising that many television scholars still have a national outlook and use the ‘national market’ as their default unit of analysis. This may also explain why the vast majority of scholars exploring TV format adaptations think of these in terms of ‘national adaptations’ (for example, Waisbord, 2004; Moran, 2005; Larkey, 2009; Beeden and de Bruin 2009; Sharp, 2012; Mirrlees, 2013; Negra, Pike, and Radley, 2012).

But there are multiple problems with this line of analysis. On a general level, there is the common but persistent conflation of state and nation. If not for the aforementioned national mythology, this conflation would be quite surprising. After all, the world is full of multi-nation states and nations without states. It is also surprising considering that language is strongly associated with culture and is a notable force in determining television consumption. However, more often than not, language does not correspond with state borders: because multiple languages can be found within the boundaries of the state (as is the case in most African countries, India, China, and several European countries) or because the dominant language is shared with other countries (as is the case with English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese and Arabic). Despite this messy reality, television scholarship dealing with this complexity is rare (see for example, Dhoest, 2011; Sun, 2013; Harindranath, 2013). But if we carefully look at the de facto situation of TV markets from above, the ‘national’ is rarely a useful concept, and if we look at broadcasters’ audience constructions and actual TV consumption more concretely, as I will do next, the notion of ‘national audiences’, too, becomes questionable.

Broadcasters’ Audience Constructions: Reflecting Complexity

If we look at broadcasters’ audience constructions for internationally formatted TV programs—despite what many television scholars assume—very often the ‘local’ adaptation is not carried out with a national or nation state audience in mind. Ndlela’s work on TV Formats in Africa (2012, 2013) demonstrates how on the African continent we find adaptations based on multiple cultural affiliations that both divide states and transcend state borders. The musical talent show Idols, for instance, has been produced in three different versions: South African Idol, which is produced in English to deal with the multiple languages spoken in South Africa; Afrikaans Idol, for the South Africans, Namibians, and small populations across Southern Africa that speak Afrikaans; and West African Idol, which seeks to incorporate diverse countries throughout the West African region, using English again as a lingua franca (Ndlela, 2012).

Ndlela’s subsequent study of Big Brother provided further insights into both the transnationality and complexity of localization in Africa. The first adaptation of this originally Dutch format for the African continent was Big Brother Africa. Launched in 2013 and watched by audiences in 47 African countries, the program saw participants from 12 countries compete against each other. The program enjoyed “enormous popularity across the continent and beyond the countries represented” (Ndlela, 2013: 57). Its success, Ndlela argues, “derives on the ‘transculturality’ and cultural hybridity of its audiences, found in the different African countries” (ibid: 64).

As was the case with Idols, the localization of Big Brother Africa was not national but tailored to an English-speaking transnational audience found in Southern Africa, East Africa, and West Africa. Moreover, because the program’s target audience was dispersed across multiple platforms, including mobile, internet and social media sites, further ‘local’ization—through, for example, the editing out of certain scenes—occurred on these platforms. Here, too, Ndlela says, differing “cultural sensibilities” were taken into account, for instance, for religious reasons. Again though, he notes, many of the additional platforms were not confined to national, or in fact any geographical space, and neither are the cultural sensibilities catered to with the localization carried out for the online distribution platforms (ibid: 65).

It is not just the cultural complexity of postcolonial countries and/or the nature of develo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Defining ‘the Local’ in Localization, or ‘Adapting for Whom?’
• 2 Transnational Holmes: Theorizing the Global-Local Nexus through the Japanese Anime Sherlock Hound (1984–)
• 3 The Context of Localization: Children’s Television in Western Europe and the Arabic-Speaking World
• 4 Audiovisual Translation Trends: Growing Diversity, Choice, and Enhanced Localization
• 5 Transformations of Montalbano through Languages and Media: Adapting and Subtitling Dialect in The Terracotta Dog
• 6 Localizing Sesame Street: The Cultural Translation of the Muppets
• 7 Television Formats in Africa: Cultural Considerations in Format Localization
• 8 Exploring Factors Influencing the Dubbing of TV Series into Spanish: Key Aspects for the Analysis of Dubbed Dialogue
• 9 Jerome Bruner and the Transcultural Adaptation of 1970s Hollywood Classics in Turkey
• 10 Tracing Asian Franchises: Local and Transnational Reception of Hana Yori Dango
• 11 Fiction TV Formats in Poland—Why Bother to Adapt?
• 12 Analyzing Players’ Perceptions on the Translation of Video Games: Assessing the Tension between the Local and the Global Concerning Language Use
• 13 Glocalization and Co-Creation: Trends in International Game Production
• Glossary
• List of Contributors
• Index