Although translation has proved invaluable to the development of screen culture since the earliest days of silent filmmaking, its centrality is rarely acknowledged within Screen Studies, particularly within Englishlanguage frameworks. With translation's value little examined, its politics have consequently remained largely submerged. Redressing this neglect, this book has provided an overview of screen translation practices and politics, and underscored the significance of improper or errant modes of practice related to parody, piracy, censorship and non-professional participation. These improper sites of subtitling and dubbing provide a key to revaluing translation's role within screen culture broadly. I argue that interlingual subtitling and dubbing operations produce errant forms of screen media, constituted by the errors and excesses of mis/translation. I term these error screens. Importantly, this book has argued that such ‘error screens’ are central, not peripheral, to screen culture – as the risks of linguistic and cultural mutation that attend interlingual subtitling and dubbing keep films, television programmes and other screen media circulating, evolving and ‘living-on’. I conclude that mis-use is central to the use-value of screen translation.

Having demonstrated how fixed notions of value and ‘quality’ are insufficient for analysing contemporary screen translation, I argue attention needs to be directed towards value politics and shifting, contextual complexities. Errant screen translation practices indicate that quality and value can be measured from any number of source/target vantage points, thereby destabilising the stability of the ‘original’. In this regard, the findings of this book lend concrete support to theories that challenge the status and authority of ‘originals’. While practising translators might find attacks on the ‘original’ difficult to bear, Anthony Pym (1995) notes how such challenges are actually quite practical. ‘Users have to believe in meaning transfer,’ he explains, while conversely, translators themselves are only too aware of the ‘plurality of translation processes’ and the ‘instability of their sources’ (Pym 1995). In screen translator training programmes, for instance, divergent approaches are taught according to genre and audience distinctions. In Italy, explains Christopher Rundle (2008: 4; 11), ‘subtitling practices and quality standards differ considerably’ between firms, reflecting the varying requirements and market niches of film festivals, DVD localisation and television broadcasting.