Mastering Teaching Audiovisual Translation to Philology Students: Challenges and Peculiarities

Abstract

This research addresses teacher training for teaching audiovisual translation (AVT), which is considered to be one of the most widely practiced fields of translation nowadays. Audiovisual or as it is also known multimodal content originated in the mid-1950s, and since then its popularity has been constantly growing. Thus, educating qualified specialists to meet the dynamically changing market demands imposes new challenges on teachers and university heads, providing a source of training for audiovisual translators. A major issue stemming from therein is to teach the basics of one of today's highest-demanded types of translation, namely AVT.It is critical to underscore that due to the complexity of the structure of the subject matter, this type of translation is considered to be one of the most difficult. AVT is barely amenable to automatization due to the complexity of its structure and is now becoming a fundamental element of the so-called human translation, a translation carried out exclusively by people, without the use of machine translation or its elements. Therefore, the process of teaching AVT significantly differs from teaching any other type of translation, or simply the language itself. This research considers the main challenges of working on audiovisual translation, along with the model exercises for its teaching. Throughout the study a survey of philology students on the topic of AVT practice has been conducted; the features and challenges they stated and faced were identified. The overall results of the survey in conjunction with the possible ways of overcoming the difficulties encountered have been presented. The study is concluded with recommendations for training sessions and workshops on the topic, as well as exemplary thematic exercises for practice.