BBC English with an Accent

African" and "Asian" Accents and the Translation of Culture in British Broadcasting

Bibliographic Data

ID4345449
AuthorsKenn Nakata Steffensen (University College Cork, Cork, Ireland, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume57
Issue2
Pages510-527
Publication date2013-02-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMeta Journal des traducteurs (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0026-0452 • E-ISSN: 1492-1421
PublisherConsortium Erudit (PUBLISHER • CA)
DOI10.7202/1013959ar
OpenAlexW1979992624
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited13

Foreign accents acted by Anglophone actors are a ubiquitous but politically and theoretically problematic feature of many audiovisual productions in the English-speaking world. This paper investigates the use of Tswana and Japanese accents in two BBC productions as acts of audiovisual translation (AVT) which are illustrative of a more general problematic of Western representations of non-Western languages and cultures. It argues that the phonological features of speech, which are classified as accents, divide the community of native speakers into different social groups and that they create and maintain boundaries between native and non-native speakers. Language discrimination is recognised by the BBC as a problem in relation to its domestic audience and the Corporation actively attempts to become more inclusive and representative of British society by broadcasting non-standard accents. On the other hand, when representing foreign, and especially post-colonial and non-Western languages and cultures, accent is used to define the boundary between the native English-speaking community and its outside. Accents are used to represent and translate the outside in stereotyping ways that tend towards racialisation and towards actors using generic "Southern African" and "East Asian" accents that bear little resemblance to the actual phonological profile of native speakers of Tswana and Japanese

Colonialism · Indigenous · Linguistics · Sociology · Speech community · Stress (linguistics) · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Second Language Learning and Teaching

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