An overview of audiovisual translation: Four methodological turns in a mature discipline

Abstract

Digital technology has played a crucial role not only in the process of production and distribution of audiovisual content, but also in the process of localization and consumption of audiovisual products. This has had an obvious impact on audiovisual translation as a field, both in professional circles as well as in scholarly research. To date, this field of research has grown exponentially, parallel to the production, consumption, interaction with and general interest in audiovisual products. At the same time, translation studies have been growing as a discipline and, consequently, has been influencing audiovisual translation (AVT) research. This article presents a due brief overview of the four turns audiovisual translation has taken to date (the descriptive, the cultural, the sociological and the cognitive turns), and identifies some of the major steps already undertaken, as well as possible research avenues that such turns are currently opening.

Preliminary design of an Initial Test of Integrated Skills within TRADILEX: an ongoing project on the validity of audiovisual translation tools in teaching English

“…The first two mentioned modalities are the most widespread: while dubbing includes a translation aimed at replacing the voices of the original actors with others that reproduce the script in another language, subtitling involves the inclusion of a written text within the image as a translation (either in FL or in the mother tongue) of the soundtrack of the audiovisual product. Today, AVT is possibly the linguistic-cultural transfer modality that has experienced the greatest boost, given that we are immersed in the global knowledge society and the digital and audiovisual revolution (Chaume, 2018;Díaz-Cintas, 2018). From the technological and software development point of view, the discipline has experienced a dizzying advance in the last decade, especially in terms of subtitling (Roales-Ruiz, 2018).…”

Los estudios de corpus y la localización una propuesta de análisis para material interactivo

“…Por último, un entorno más al que debemos referirnos, y en estrecha relación con la localización, con el uso de corpus y con la multimodalidad, es la Traducción Audiovisual (TAV), algo más antigua que la práctica localizadora, ya que surgió de la mano de la industria cinematográfica (Díaz Cintas y Anderman 2009) y, desde entonces, su flexibilidad ha sido evidente (Orero 2004) a la hora de acomodarse al amplio y cambiante mercado de productos audiovisuales, no solo desde la práctica profesional, sino también con una gran variedad de planteamientos investigadores (Chaume 2018a).…”

An Excursus on Audiovisual Translation

“…Other theoretical frameworks beyond descriptivism have also proved operative and fruitful in the investigation of the various AVT modes, such as action research (Neves 2004), relevance theory (Bogucki 2004, Pai 2017, multimodal analysis (Taylor 2013) and actor network theory (Eardley-Weaver 2014, Williamson 2015. For scholars like Chaume (2018), the way in which research has evolved in AVT can be schematised in four sequential turns, -i.e. descriptive, cultural, sociological and cognitive -, which is a neat attempt to provide a synoptic overview of our academic efforts across the years.…”