My paper Building Icons: Forrest Gump's Journey from a Mediocre Novel to a Six-Oscar Movie compares and contrasts the novel Forrest Gump by Winston Groom and the eponymous movie based on Groom's novel, screenplay by Eric Roth. The paper outlines the changes made into Groom's funny but flawed novel in order to turn it into a hugely successful, iconic movie and analyses the reasons behind the changes: characters were changed to make them more tragic or admirable; characters and plot elements were removed to give the story more unity and dignity; scenes were added to make better use of the visual and aural dimensions. Some elements of the novel were also "sanitized" or censored in order to make the movie suitable for a wider audience. The paper suggests that there would seem to be a "recipe" of sorts for making popular American movies and that the movie Forrest Gump might be the product of such a recipe.

Another aspect of popular culture that came up in the research for the paper is metafiction and how different movies, novels, songs, and stories of a culture are connected. It is very important for a translator to be aware of this phenomenon, because failing to spot and correctly translate an allusion can result in losing a crucial part of the author's intended meaning. The movie also includes some humanipulation — deceased celebrities or historical figures interacting with others via computer technology. This can cause culture bumps if foreign viewers are unfamiliar with these figures and they are not explicitly named, but I am not sure how an audiovisual translator would solve this problem — the medium severely limits possible explanations and clarifications. The legal and ethical aspects of humanipulation are also very interesting.

From a translator's point of view, it would be interesting to compare Groom's novel with the Finnish translation (Erkki Jukarainen 1994) or the movie to the Finnish subtitles. Translating the novel (and on a smaller scale, the movie) is made difficult by Forrest's unique spelling and grammar, which may in part be due to his low IQ and low level of education but also to his Southern roots. His Alabama dialect could be studied from the point of view of translating dialects.

The Finnish language has many dialects that would make an interesting study, but I am not sure of how useful such study would be for a translator. On the other hand, there have been several recent translations into dialects, such as the dialect Bibles and Matti Lehmonen's Kalevala Savon kielellä (The Kalevala in Savonian).

Related Aspects of Finnish Popular Culture

More related to the central ideas of the paper is the construction of cultural icons and popular phenomena. It would be interesting to analyze Finnish cultural icons, possibly through movies or novels, and compare them with American icons or the icons of other countries. Would there be fundamental differences, and what would they be? Would strong similarities be the result of the universal nature of some icons? Are universal icons the result of globalization? Are there any universal cultural icons, and by extension, universal cultures?

Alas, most of these questions are not of any direct relevance for translators. However, knowledge about Finnish (and American) culture and the differences between the cultures in a translator's language area can only help. Understanding cultural "deep structures" is an invaluable asset for anyone transferring meanings from one culture to another.