Re-screening the Past

Multi-tiered Reframing in Dubbing History Films

Abstract

This study explores the ways in which translation dynamically reshapes the past, offering new insights into the reframing practices that emerge through the dubbing of history films. It conceptualizes renarration of historical reality as a multi-tiered hermeneutic movement from the intralingual rewriting of the past, to the intersemiotic cinematic screening of the historical narrative, and ultimately to re-screening historical reality in cross-cultural contexts via interlingual dubbing. Drawing on critical historiography and narrative constructivism, the study analyzes four Persian-dubbed Hollywood history films and demonstrates that dubbing, as the third reframing tier, recurrently attenuates or omits explicit sexuality, romantic betrayal, religious specificity, and politically sensitive motives, while adjusting character relations and moral evaluations to align with dominant cultural norms in the target context. The article thus suggests that dubbing functions not only as a linguistic transfer but as a culturally embedded mediation of historical narrative, where the past is reimagined, and re-historicized.