Ocean’s Eleven stand-alone Scene 12 with subtitles: A gift for teaching, what lessons for research?

This article considers Scene12 from Soderbergh’s 2001 Ocean’s Eleven from two angles: as a productive scene for teaching fundamentals of audiovisual translation (AVT), and as a cautionary tale for research. Scene 12 is unusual and unrepresentative in its all-in-one illustrative richness, and a comprehensive microcosm that makes it an excellent tool for teaching, and drawing attention to basic and more complex aspects and features of cultural and linguistic transfer in a multimodal context. By the same token, it is an invitation to (re-)appraise on the larger scale of full cinematic contexts the complexity of AVT as cross-cultural mediation and its implications for research. The article is one of several focusing on Ocean’s Eleven Scene12 for the Special Issue of Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice on AVT and Interdisciplinarity of which it is a part. The shared dataset for the scene and rationale for its choice are found in the Introduction to the volume.