Justine Huet

The spatialization of the translator and translating in Bon Cop Bad Cop

If the first films made in the belle province betray a certain insularity in their depiction of Québécois stories intended for an exclusively Québécois audience, the past several years have witnessed the emergence of a more open Québécois cinema. One of the biggest commercial successes in this cinematic turn remains Bon Cop Bad Cop (2006), a bilingual film in which the main characters, two police inspectors, embody Canada’s two solitudes (MacLennan): one is an anglophone from Ontario while the other is a francophone from Quebec. The status of the French and English languages and their cultural power seems to be the real subject of the film, which is conveyed through a play on the “spatialization” of the two languages, that is to say, a play on the physical space of languages. We will consider how this is developed through the use of both physical space and the presence of “translator-characters.”

Keywords: cinema, Quebec, hybridization, translator-character

Biography

Justine Huet is an Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Mount Royal University in Calgary. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies and an MA in French Literature from the University of Alberta, and a Licence in Anglophone Studies from the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon. Her research interests include audiovisual translation and hybrid identities. She has received a number of important awards and has published various articles, the most recent of which is “Dubbing The Flintstones: How do you say yabba-dabba-doo in French?”