Negotiating Cultural Transfer: A Case Study on Turkish and French Dubbing of Netflix’s Emily in Paris

Abstract

Audiovisual Translation (AVT) has been drawing scholarly attention due to the proliferation of streaming platforms that offer subtitles, closed captions, audio description, and dubbing across multiple languages. This article examines how multilingualism is negotiated in the French and Turkish dubbed versions of Netflix’s Emily in Paris, as it provides us with an intriguing case study offering an opportunity to examine the nuances of dubbing in two distinct linguistic and cultural contexts: French and Turkish, a Western language and a non-Western language. With dialogues in both French and English, this bilingual and hybrid production provides an unusual opportunity to examine cultural transfer in dubbing. This case study focuses on Season 3, Episode 2, entitled “What is it all about…?” (in English), “Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire?” (in French), and “Ne olacak… (in Turkish)”. Including bilingual dialogues and references to both American and French cultures in the source language, this episode exemplifies the complexities of cultural transfer. The primary focus of this study is to investigate the role of multilingualism in the cultural transfer within the dubbing in both the French and Turkish versions of the episode. On the whole, this study demonstrates the challenges and culturally adaptive solutions involved in dubbing a bilingual series like Emily in Paris.  The article argues these versions restructure multilingualism in ways shaped by linguistic proximity, target audience expectations, and audiovisual constraints.