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Audiovisual translation. When modalities merge

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0907676x.2012.722656

1747-6623

Anna Matamala, Pilar Orero,

Subtitles and Audiovisual Media

Audiovisual Translation (AVT) has for some time enjoyed a special place in Translation Studies (TS), with many conferences, monographs and special issues in prestigious journals devoted to the many specialities within the field.An effort has been placed at bridging the two traditionally isolated realms of theory and practice, and recently a multidisciplinary approach has been identified as the way forward when dealing with research and training in AVT.The world of AVT is indeed a natural interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary habitat which mirrors the many audiovisual translation modes that nowadays merge in the very complex scenario of media formats and their broadcast.The ever changing world of technology is leading a new direction where people continuously interact with electronic devices.In the many available platforms (cloud, smart, connected, hybrid, etc) and formats (television, DVD, web, mobile, cinema, opera, theatre) several translation modes sharing and making available the information within are to be found.Traditional modalities such as dubbing, voice-over or subtitling are used next to newer media accessibility modalities such as audio description, sign language and subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing, which entail intersemiotic transfer processes that go well beyond traditional linguistic or even cultural definitions of translation.Concerning research, traditional methods in the field of AVT, mainly based on case studies and descriptive approaches, are giving way to more experimental and applied studies that use methods drawn from Psychology, Communication and Social Science studies.In this fast-changing scenario, this Special issue aims to survey the present state of affairs, and more importantly to offer a window into the future in AVT, mapping a very dynamic field within the realm of TS.It includes five contributions by authors from three different continents who tackle issues such as evaluation of text chunking on live respoken subtitles by means of eye-tracking, subtitle reading in a second language, game localisation, subtitles in speech-language therapy, and interlingual subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH).Despite the willingness of the editors to create an issue with an extensive array of topics, subtitling seems to concentrate most of the interest in this volume, albeit with various approaches.The two first contributions make use of eye-tracking to investigate effects of text chunking on subtitling and reading second language subtitles, respectively.In their article, Rajendran, Duchowski, Orero, Martínez and Romero-Fresco evaluate subtitles created with different chunking systems to determine, by means of eye-tracking, if segmentation influences the viewing experience.Four subtitle styles are evaluated in the study: no segmentation, word-for-