Afro-American cultural references in the film adaptation of The Help: difficulties and strategies of the English-Spanish translation process

Abstract

This paper aims to study the cultural references of The Help from a translation studies approach. The analysis has a double perspective: i) the linguistic translation (English into Spanish), and ii) the change of code or literature-into-fi lm adaptation, paying special attention to the Spanish subtitles. For this reason, and before the analysis, we include here a comprehensive description of the evolution of the Afro-American culture in the cinema; also, we study the concept of culture-bound elements, the linguistic features of African American Vernacular English, and the implications it has for translation.