Summary: Slashing and Subtitles | Tessa Dwyer <strong>Slashing and Subtitles: Romanian Media Piracy, Censorship and Translation</strong> Based on research undertaken in collaboration with Romanian national Ioana Uricaru, this paper focuses on media piracy in pre-1989 communist Romania involving the translation of banned foreign-language films and television programs. Noting how translation can function both in the service and subversion of censorship, and how both roles are complicated by contradictory notions of quality and authenticity, I begin by pitting Romania’s government-sanctioned translation methods against the unofficial, amateur practices that typify piracy operations. I then proceed to unpack and expand notions of media piracy to include niche, expert and online modes of engagement. It is my contention that the audiovisual translation techniques that accompany both censorship and piracy processes provide a largely unexamined angle from which to interrogate the politics of film exhibition, distribution and reception. Tessa Dwyer is a doctoral candidate in the School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne, researching issues surrounding film and translation. Her film articles have been published in journals such as The South Atlantic Quarterly, Polygraph and Linguistica Antverpiensia, and in the anthology A Deleuzian Century? (1995). Currently co-editing a special issue of the online journal Refractory on the subject of the split screen, she is the former Director of the Centre for Contemporary Photography and a member of the World Picture e-journal advisory board. Her article ‘Slashings and Subtitles’ on which this talk is based, is forthcoming in The Velvet Light Trap.
