Areas and Methods of Audiovisual Translation Research

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Preface to the Third Revised Edition

With the rapid development of audiovisual translation (AVT) and media accessibility – understood not only as a range of professional language services, but first and foremost as a discipline – more and more researchers find themselves in need of academic sources on research methods. If you are a researcher interested in various AVT research areas and methods, this book is for you.

What you are reading is a third, revised edition. The latest edition is a result of the rapid developments in the field, which – paradoxically – lie at the heart of the major problem related to books on AVT: the information they contain becomes obsolete quickly. New updated editions are needed to keep abreast of new developments and that’s exactly the intention of this new edition. New areas of research and methods in AVT have been born since the previous edition of this book, for instance interlingual live subtitling with respeaking or AVT in immersive environments.

Łukasz Bogucki’s take on areas and research methods in AVT presented in this book is approachable and highly readable. Theoretical considerations are interspersed with real-life examples of audiovisual translation practices, either from films or the author’s personal life, particularly in the Polish context. By the Author’s own admission, the book is not intended as a manual or textbook on how to use different research methods in AVT. Instead, the author takes a broader and more theoretical view, and draws a general picture of the varied practices and paradigms used in the field.

Every discipline needs established methods and codes of research practices. As a relative newcomer to the academia, AVT necessarily draws on its elder siblings like translation studies, linguistics, literary and cultural studies, sociology or psychology, to name just a few. Modern AVT researchers may find themselves trapped between two contrasting paradigms: empirical sciences and liberal arts (see also Chapter 3). The former requires scientific rigour in conducting and reporting research, whereas the latter allows authors to make claims based more on intuition rather than empirical evidence informed by actual experimental research. Bogucki’s book discusses both types of paradigms, albeit focuses more on those traditionally rooted in the humanities rather than social sciences.

Thanks to reading this book, as an AVT researcher may become more aware of the multitude of options you have when approaching your research questions as well as when designing and conducting your studies. The author presents a broad, threefold overview of AVT research: (1) areas, including linguistic and ← 9 | 10 → cultural aspects, translation quality assessment, or multilingualism, (2) theoretical approaches, such as descriptive translation studies, norms, Relevance Theory, action research, skopos, reception studies, and (3) methods, such as think-aloud protocols, multimodal analysis, corpus research, or eye tracking.

If you are beginning your academic journey with audiovisual translation, this book is a very good starting point. If you are familiar with AVT, it can come in useful as a quick reference or handbook. In any case, it’s a nice book to have in your bookcase.

Agnieszka Szarkowska
University of Warsaw

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Introduction
Translation in the Age of Multimedia

Audiovisual translation (AVT) is a prime example of the development and redefinition of translation studies in the 21^st century. Practised for tens of centuries, translation achieved full academic recognition only a few decades ago (cf. Gentzler 1993; Venuti 2000; see also the diachronic perspective in chapter one). Even today, translation studies has yet to be considered an official academic discipline in many countries (see Bogucki 2015). The practice of translation is now undergoing an unparalleled period of constant, dynamic development. The acronym GILT (Globalisation, Internationalisation, Localisation, Translation – see e.g. Cronin 2003; Hatim and Munday 2004:113) and the blend glocalisation (used predominantly in economy and sociology, e.g. Ritzer 2004, but also in translational contexts, e.g. House 2009:80) indicate the current shifts in the nature of translating. The concept of automatising translation and impressive headway in computer technology have resulted in a proliferation of computer assisted translation tools, which are now sophisticated, multifunctional software packages that have revolutionised the translation process. Specialised software is also par for the course in translating audiovisual material, the focal point of the discussion in hand.

The current age is clearly a screen-dominated era. Blackboards and chalk, concomitant with most people’s late childhood, have now been superseded by interactive whiteboards. Closed-circuit television monitors the lives of townspeople. Ostensibly unambiguous words such as “friend” or “like” now require redefining to accommodate their Facebook senses. The proliferation of “smartphone zombies” has led some towns to introduce special pedestrian lanes where “phubbers” could safely walk staring at their phones at the same time¹. Giving film priority over literature, Zabalbeascoa (2010:25) sarcastically remarks that “writers are only really socially visible when they go on strike as script producers for Hollywood film and television.” On the theoretical plane, O’Halloran et al. (2010) note the necessary shift of interest from linguistic aspects of communication to models and theories rooted in social semiotics, taking into account multiple modes of communication. ← 11 | 12 →

The starting point of this discussion is that translation is no longer defined as an operation on texts in the traditional sense. While embarking on a detailed discussion on the notion of text is outside the scope of the present work, it must be noted, after Bertrand and Hughes (2005:173), that “a text is not a vessel into which meanings are poured for transmission to others, but a structure (or a ‘system of signification’) by which meanings are produced within a cultural context”. This semiotic approach to communication operates on the level of meaning; with respect to form, texts have become digitised, evolving to hypertext. Filmic messages are referred to as texts, more precisely audiovisual texts (see e.g. Petitt 2004). Gottlieb (2005:2) proposes this modern and unorthodox understanding of text:

Later in the paper, he defines text as “any combination of sensory signs carrying communicative intention” (Gottlieb 2005:3), thus favouring a very broad, interdisciplinary approach.

Though filmic messages bear no comparison to conventional texts, either in terms of volume or tradition, their role in communication is gaining importance. This change is symbolically represented by the addition of a fourth (hyper)text type to the three proposed in Reiss’ seminal approach, viz. informative, expressive and operative (Reiss 1977). Audiomedial texts (songs, comic strips, advertisements, medieval morality ballads, but predominantly filmic messages) take into account the special characteristics of spoken language and oral communication, and sit above the three basic communicative situations (providing information, expressing feelings and persuading to take action) and corresponding text types. They take into account additional information supplied by another sign system and “though put down in writing, are presented orally.” (Reiss 1981:126). Motion pictures and television have recently been supported by the Internet, a (multi)medium, more precisely a collection of digital and electronic media, whose spread and potential is massive. Audiovisual information can currently be disseminated with a speed and range never before achievable. According to BBC news, the box-office hit Avatar sold 4 million DVDs and 2.7 million Blu-rays in just four days, in North America alone2. In 2007, the most popular video on YouTube had nearly 56 million views; the number one in April 2011, ← 12 | 13 → a Justin Bieber clip, was streamed 507,455,572 times3, a ninefold increase in the popularity of the service in four years. Psy’s Gangnam Style, the number one in 2015, has been seen 3,266,366,179 times as of January 2019⁴, but the current number one, Despacito, has had 5,891,486,339 views to date⁵.

This proliferation of audiovisual content raises the question of its role in culture. Zabalbeascoa (2010:33) introduces the concept of audiovisual literacy, posing the provocative question “can one call oneself an expert on Shakespeare through books alone, without having seen any stage productions or a number of film versions?” If the aim of literary translation is to make literature accessible to the general readership not conversant with the language of the original, then the mission of audiovisual translation is to allow widespread access to the art of film, not infrequently salvaging from oblivion those artistic gems whose only drawback is that they were made in a minority language. However, since the scope of AVT goes far beyond providing foreign language versions of feature films (see chapter one), its role in mass communication is even greater.