Do palco à legenda: uma análise da tradução do inglês para o português brasileiro da canção Highway to Hell, da banda AC/DC

Abstract

This senior thesis seeks to investigate the translation techniques used in the subtitling of the song “Highway to Hell” by the Australian hard rock band AC/DC. The subject of this study is the subtitles produced for the music video taken from the band’s legendary performance at the Monsters of Rock festival, held at Donington Park, England, on August 17, 1991. This historic concert, attended by more than 72,000 people, gave rise to the celebrated VHS/DVD “Live at Donington,” whose television broadcast in Brazil was a landmark event on entertainment channels such as Multishow and, more recently, on Canal Bis (GloboSat) on the Globoplay streaming platform. The objective of this study is to understand the choices made and their relationship to the cultural and discursive context of the work. To this end, an analysis was conducted of the song in its entirety, as well as of five selected excerpts, seeking to map the treatment of metaphors, idiomatic expressions, and markers of orality in the translation from English to Brazilian Portuguese. The analysis is based on the framework proposed by Molina and Hurtado Albir (2002) regarding translation techniques. The results highlight the occurrence of procedures such as usual equivalence, particularization, amplification, modulation, variation, and compensation. This demonstrates that the translator’s choices are influenced both by the constraints inherent to audiovisual translation related to subtitling—such as screen time and available physical space—and by the need to recreate the effects and aesthetic energy for the Brazilian audience.