Mediating Rap Videoclips for Diverse Audiences: The Challenges of Transferring Allusions

Translating music raises issues that go beyond conventional translation. In fact, music brings together several texts, the first of which is the verbal text in the form of lyrics, and auditory text in that of auditory signs; should that music come in the form of a video, then it raises the challenges of audiovisual translation in all its components; should the music video be of rap music, then complexity is heightened particularly given the richness of cultural innuendos, or allusions, such musical type contains. The present study draws on concepts from literary studies and audiovisual translation to identify and analyze allusions in rap videoclip. Leppihalme (1997) speaks about allusions as “culture-bumps”, while Pedersen (2005) says that they are part of what he calls “translation crisis points”. Both scholars refer to the same idea: A problematic crossroads at which the translator stops and reflects before making a decision. This is the first and most important part of the translation process. This study focuses on a detailed analysis of the videoclip “This is America”, by the rapper Childish Gambino, taking into account the multillayered nature of rap music and its complexity both on the verbal and the non-verbal levels. The analysis stemmed from two main frameworks: Leppihalme’s model (1997) concerning verbal allusions and Kirillov’s categories of allusion (2003). Both frameworks were originally designed for literary texts, however, they were adapted to the specificities of the audiovisual text. Given the complex nature of rap videoclips, I am questioning whether different audiences, with or without disabilities, namely people from different cultures or with sensory impairment, can have true access to the allusions, even if traditional audiovisual translation genres – subtitling, subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing or audio description are used.