My Name is Khan: Engagement, Affect and Conflict in Audiovisual Translation

One of the main findings of the interdisciplinary debate in Media studies, Critical Discourse Analysis and the Appraisal Framework in Systemic Functional Linguistics, on the representation of conflicts and migration in the media is that the latter have in the last decade increased their ‘affective labour’, triggering feelings of anxiety, vulnerability and alarm towards transnational mobility (Baker 2006; Massumi 2009; Thomson and White 2008; Wodak 2008). Notwithstanding the necessity of historicizing racist and xenophobic discourses and rhetorics, studies using the Appraisal framework have found that the lexico-grammatical resources which regulate appraisal, affect and evaluation may be employed explicitly to inscribe and/or implicitly to invoke affects such as worry and fear, not in order to prevent and prescribe them but to intensify and diffuse them (Martin and White 2005; Tilakaratna and Mahboob 2013). Following this line of thought, the article contends that the analysis of the audiovisual translation of transnational films such as My Name is Khan (2010), may provide the grounds for the investigation of the ways in which migration and conflicts are appraised and reframed in translation to target translocal audiences. In this sense, the “dialogistic perspective” of the Appraisal framework leads the present article to attend to the nature of the relationship which the adapter/translator establishes with “prior utterances in the same sphere”, i.e. with those who have previously taken a stand with respect to the issue of migration and conflict within a transnational community of shared belief or value (Martin and White 2005: 93).