Fast-Forwarding with Audiovisual Translation

It is fair to say that in today’s society we have become increasingly dependent on the affordability offered by digital technology to communicate with our peers and, consequently, exchanges have become more audiovisual than ever before and a multitude of screens have taken over the private and public spaces. The transition from the paper page to the digital page has brought about a number of substantial changes that have had a great impact not only on the way in which information and messages are transmitted but also on the role played by users and consumers in this new and dynamic environment. The transmission of information through productions that combine the audio and the visual planes has gained enormous ground in recent decades and has relegated other more traditional, conventional media such as books, journals or newspapers. After the invention of cinema at the end of the 19th century and the advent of television in the 1950s, the development of the internet in the 1990s can be hailed as one of the most significant milestones in human (audiovisual) communication. Indeed, the web and social media have had a transformative impact on the way in which we interact and communicate with each other, mainly due to the attractiveness of the audiovisual format in which audio and visuals come together in a symbiotic whole, thus enhancing the semiotic possibilities of the composite message and its potential to improve comprehension and retention.

All communication acts are based on the production, transmission and reception of information among the various participants in the process. Although achieving successful communication is always a more complex goal than it may seem at first sight, even when the interlocutors are meant to be sharing the same language, the situation becomes ever more challenging when different languages are spoken. Interpreting and translation have existed from time immemorial as human activities aimed at facilitating understanding by bringing down linguistic and cultural barriers. In this sense, translation practices have run parallel to the history of communication and have experienced a similar evolution in recent decades, gradually shifting from the printed paper to the more dynamic, digital screen. It goes without saying that the recent burgeoning in audiovisual communication, especially since the entrenchment in society of digital technology in the 1990s, has triggered a similar boom in the practice of audiovisual translation (AVT) that can only continue to expand and flourish in the foreseeable future. In this social process of audiovisualisation-cum-internetisation, translation activity has had to morph and embrace new translational ways of dealing with the original audiovisual message – such as subtitling, dubbing, voiceover or narration – and to cater for the needs of a new and wider audience that also includes the sensory impaired, for whom targeted professional AVT practices have been fast developing: subtitling for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing (SDH), respeaking and audio description (AD) for the blind and the partially sighted. Inclusion in the form of accessibility to audiovisual media for all has become an important debate in many countries around the globe, featuring prominently in legislation, academic exchanges and broadcasters’ output. As government regulators impose new rules and regulations on broadcasters and other distributors regarding access services to audiovisual media, the various stakeholders in the field are joining efforts to conduct research that can inform the professional world by highlighting best practices and approaches.

The societal influence of AVT has expanded its remit both in terms of the number of people that it reaches as well as the nature of the programmes that are translated. Indeed, millions of us encounter translation on screen on a regular basis and, if AVT was initially a commercial practice to boost the international distribution of feature films, the situation has changed radically and the nature of the audiovisual productions that are translated nowadays is virtually limitless, whether for ludic or instructional purposes: films, TV series, animation and cartoons, documentaries, cookery programmes, news, edutainment, commercials, sports programmes, educational lectures and corporate videos to name but a few. Even newspapers, until not so long ago available only in print form, have gone through substantial changes in the last decade and now host videos on their websites that are usually translated with subtitles when language transfer is required and, in their print publications, they direct users to the relevant URL address, where readers can watch those videos. The old discrete distinction between the roles of producers and consumers has also become somewhat blurred with the coinage of the neologism prosumer, a direct result of the new potentiality offered by social media and the digital world in general. In addition to reading and consuming others’ programmes, netizens are frequently encouraged to become producers themselves and to create their own user-generated content that can be easily assembled with freely available video editing suites installed on their computers, smartphones or tablets; uploaded to any of the numerous sharing platforms that populate the world wide web; and distributed throughout the globe in an instant.

From its very beginnings, AVT has been closely linked to technological developments (Díaz Cintas, 2015). The analogue signal has been superseded by digital technology, and the VHS tape disappeared many years ago, giving way to the then revolutionary DVD, which, in turn, is being phased out and taken over by streaming, an alternative to the purchasing of material media formats or to the downloading of them onto hard drives. The way in which we consume audiovisual productions has also altered significantly, from the early large public spaces represented by the cinema theatres, to the family experience of watching the television in the privacy of the living room, to the more individualistic approach of binge watching our favourite programmes in front of our personal computer, tablet or smartphone. Instead of sitting with the rest of the family after lunch or dinner and watching prime-time television, today’s viewers tend to be more independent and impatient when it comes to their watching habits and expectations and want to be able to enjoy their preferred programmes whenever they choose, including on the go, and on any of the various devices they possess. Video-on-demand (VOD) services are a commercial response to try and meet the needs of this new breed of viewer by allowing them to watch what they want, when they want and in the quantities that they want. All this, of course, has been made possible thanks to the developments in technology, the rise of the internet, which continues to penetrate even the most remote corners of the world, and the significant increase in transmission speeds enabled by broadband. As an illustration, and in addition to guaranteeing free public wi-fi in all member states, one of the objectives of the European Union in the short term is to enable 5G, the next telecommunications standards that would allow the streaming of high-definition media with mobile devices, thus boosting easier and greater access to audiovisual media in various formats.

To a large extent, AVT has been at the mercy of the twists and turns of technology and it is thanks to the instrumental role played by technology that subtitles can today be successfully produced live with minimal latency, that subtitlers can work in cloud-based environments, usually from the comfort of their own home, that subtitlers’ productivity has been enhanced thanks to the development of user-friendly software that enables professionals to work at a faster pace than before, and that audio-described content for the blind and subtitles for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing have become a common occurrence on our screens. Research on the way in which technology is used in AVT and on its potential to automatise processes and outputs, such as machine translation applied to subtitling (Bywood et al., 2017), is becoming more popular and mainstream in AVT. In view of these developments, as argued by O’Hagan (2016), one of the main challenges faced by translation scholars is to be able to find an appropriate theoretical framework that would allow a critical examination of the significant role that technology has on translation output; a task that is proving surprisingly elusive in our discipline.

This flurry of activity observed in the media and the technology industries has had the positive knock-on effect of raising the visibility and status of AVT at the academic level, as attested by the exponential growth in the number of research projects, publications, conferences and undergraduate/postgraduate courses that have developed around the world in a relatively short period of time. The traditional focus of the pioneering scholarly studies conducted in the field of AVT tended to be biased towards the analysis of the role played by language, the challenges encountered when carrying out linguistic transfer and the translational strategies activated by translators to overcome them. With the passing of the years, the scope of the research has widened considerably to encompass many other aspects that directly impinge on the actual transfer that takes place. The study of the way in which cultural values pertaining to the source culture are dealt with in their travel to the target culture as well as the idiosyncrasies that characterise the professional practice of the various AVT modes are two areas that have featured prominently in some of the past publications and are also examined in various studies showcased in this collective volume, which take as their subject matter the representation of the Other through the translation prism, the impact of censorial forces on the subtitling of sensitive issues, the search for appropriate guidelines that can guarantee high-quality standards in AD and in SDH and the needs and expectations of multi-language vendors working in AVT when recruiting new translation professionals.

Studies centred on more traditional activities such as subtitling and dubbing cohabit these days with investigations that help to widen the remit of AVT to encompass the area of media accessibility and prefer to shift their focus from the textual niceties of the original to the potential effects that the ensuing translation has on viewers. In this regard, AVT is a prime example of a research area markedly interdisciplinary and increasingly willing to rely on technology and statistical analysis to interrogate the data under scrutiny. As two relatively dormant and ignored areas in AVT, reception studies and cognitive processes have become pivotal in recent academic exchanges and it may be argued that the viewer, or end user, has to a large extent become the focal point of the study of AVT and media accessibility. In this respect, it can be said that a qualitative shift has taken place, moving away from academic debates that focused primarily on the linguistic make-up of the audiovisual source and target texts to studies in which the receptor of the text becomes the central point of interest.

As a catalyst of this change, experimental research has come to be one of the relatively recent developments taking place in AVT studies, and the various studies presented in this book that are based on empirical inquiry of this nature are a testimony to this fresh trend. Academics working in AVT are no longer content with describing a given state of affairs or taking for granted certain inherited premises that have been passed on unchallenged in the available literature. Rather, by exploiting psychometric methodologies and by embracing technologies and statistical data analysis tools available to them, AVT scholars are eager these days to test the validity of their theories experimentally, to unravel the cognitive effort implicit in the translational process or to describe the effects that AVT practices have on the various heterogeneous groups that make up the audience, on translators-to-be and on professionals already working in the field. Of particular note is the application of physiological instruments such as eye trackers to the experimental investigation of AVT (Perego, 2012). These devices, which measure eye positions and eye movement, and are common currency in research fields like advertising and medical sciences, have provided scholars interested in AVT with the appropriate methodology to move away from speculation to concrete observation of subjects’ reactions and data-based research.

Traditionally, reception studies have been avoided in AVT as they were considered to be too complex in their implementation, costly and lengthy. In addition, the right technology to conduct experimental research was not really available and the expertise was lacking on the part of the pioneering AVT researchers. Yet, there seems to be a growing consensus nowadays that reception studies are important for the sustainability of the discipline and for the strengthening of links between the industry and academia; a cooperation that in turn holds promise for the development and provision of better products for end users. The close collaboration between the industry and academia is an important one in AVT. The media industry is interested in knowing how viewers perceive their subtitled, dubbed, voiced-over, respoken or audio-described audiovisual productions; technology companies working in the development of state-of-the-art subtitling software and cloud-based systems for AVT can also benefit from the results yielded by experimental research with professionals; and language service providers specialising in AVT can profit from the insights gained through reception research, which can help them to adapt their practices to new workflows, to update their style guides to cater for new audiences or to reconsider some of the traditionally accepted spatial and temporal considerations that have marked the translation and delivery of their audiovisual programmes.

As previously stated, the research ecosystem in translation has changed quite substantially in recent years and eye tracking monitoring is now widely used in experimental research in AVT to gauge the attention paid by viewers to the various parts of the screen and the different visual components of the audiovisual production, in an attempt to gain a better understanding of their cognitive processes while watching the audiovisual programme, with or without subtitles. The potentiality of this tool is tested in two of the chapters included in the current volume in an effort to evaluate viewers’ perception and reaction when reading subtitles that cross over shot changes, and to examine the cognitive processes involved in the act of translating for dubbing. In addition to instruments like eye trackers, a wide array of other cognitive and evaluative measures such as questionnaires and interviews can also be used to conduct examinations centred on reception and process, as evidenced in two other chapters included in this book: one investigating specifically the response of older adults to dubbing and subtitling, and the other making recourse to cognitive linguistics to gain a more solid insight into the brain procedures at work when creating interlingual subtitles.

In addition to the already discussed benefits of eye tracking, potential still exists in our discipline to make full use of other biometric instruments that can help elucidate the reaction of the audience, such as galvanic skin response devices to measure participants’ levels of arousal, and webcams to record and conduct facial expression analysis. Electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiograms (ECG) also open up a wealth of possibilities. EEG is a neuroimaging technique that helps to assess brain activity associated with perception, cognitive behaviour and emotional processes by foregrounding the parts of the brain that are active while participants perform a task or are exposed to certain stimulus material. ECG, on the other hand, monitors heart activity in an attempt to track respondents’ physical state, their anxiety and stress levels, which in turn can provide helpful insights into cognitive-affective processes.

Although the metaphor of the language barrier is a real one, whose ultimate instantiation is the breakdown of communication among speakers of different linguistic codes and cultural backgrounds, exposing viewers to audiovisual content that has been originally created in another language may still have the potential to stir these viewers’ interest in the source culture and language. Viewers of audiovisual productions in so-called subtitling countries will sometimes claim that they learned English, the main source language of audiovisual content in many countries, by watching films and TV programmes in the original language, and they tend to be credited with a higher command of foreign languages than their counterparts in dubbing countries. Intrigued by these assumptions, scholars have embarked on the exploration of the didactic potential offered by the various AVT modes when it comes to foreign language teaching and learning (Incalcaterra McLoughlin et al., 2011). The topic has been a fruitful one, with international projects like ClipFlair (Foreign Language Learning through Interactive Revoicing & Captioning of Clips, http://clipflair.net) and PluriTAV (Audiovisual Translation as a Tool for the Development of Multilingual Competences in the Classroom, http://citrans.uv.es/pluritav/?lang=en) having seen the light in recent years. The enthusiasm in this area is also shared by the authors of two of the chapters included in this book, that delve into the exploitation of AD as a didactic tool in the foreign language classroom and the role of subtitling in language planning, respectively.

Fast-Forwarding with Audiovisual Translation offers an up-to-date survey of the present state of affairs in AVT, focusing on some of the current issues that shape this discipline and are generating increasing interest at professional, educational and scholarly levels. One of the main aims of the book is to take the pulse of the changes taking place in this thriving field, by concentrating not only on current projects and research being carried out in AVT but also on the professional practice as conducted in a wide range of contexts and language combinations. In order to establish the groundwork from which different branches and approaches have recently sprung up, the chapters have been carefully selected to cover a wide array of topics from the more traditional subtitling and dubbing to media accessibility practices like SDH and AD for the blind and the visually impaired. To offer as complete a picture as possible, various media and contexts are also considered by the authors, including television, DVD, internet and cinema.

The collection of chapters brings together a group of scholars and academics of proven international reputation, who have been working in this field for many years in countries such as Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain, Turkey, the UK and the United Arab Emirates. In an accessible and engaging style, the 12 contributions to the subject contained in this volume discuss theoretical issues in close relation to real translation problems and empirical data, providing at the same time useful and practical insights into the personalised input that translators inevitably give to their work. Special attention is also paid to the working methodologies currently in place and to the research tools currently used.

The book is divided into four distinctive parts organised around discrete thematic fields. Part 1 contains three chapters and focuses on the study of language and culture in AVT, while reception and process studies are the main threads structuring the second part of this book, which is made up of four chapters. The three chapters included in the third part adopt a more professional angle and bring to the fore important considerations that characterise the working environment of this potent industry. In the fourth and last part, two chapters concentrate on the potential offered by AVT from a didactic and pedagogical perspective.

Part 1 of the book centres on the various challenges encountered by translators when dealing with the transfer of language and culture in audiovisual productions. The first contribution to open the book is the chapter written by Vincenza Minutella entitled ‘Globalising Bollywood: My Name Is Khan from India to Italy through Hollywood’, in which she uses the Italian dubbed version of the Indian film My Name Is Khan as her case study. Co-produced with Hollywood in a clear attempt to bring Bollywood to the world, this multilingual film makes novel use of language to linguistically represent the bilingual identity of the Indian characters. By making use of textual sources – original screenplay, film dialogue, master English subtitle/spotting list, Italian translated dialogue and Italian dubbed version – as well as extratextual sources – interviews with the screenplay writer, the dubbing director and the dialogue writer – the chapter tries to unravel how language, cultural stereotypes and the actual film have been manipulated during the production, distribution and translation-adaptation-dubbing processes. The author’s interest lies in uncovering how US distributors and Italian dubbing professionals have dealt with the representation of the ethnic and religious identity of the various Indian characters portrayed in the film and, in doing so, she also unveils the processes of writing, rewriting, manipulation and domestication that the Indian movie has undergone before reaching its Italian audience.

Marina Manfredi’s contribution, ‘How to be Indian in Canada, How to Be Indie in Italy: Dubbing a TV Sitcom for Teenagers’, explores a relatively new (sub-)genre in the field of AVT, namely multiethnic, multicultural situation comedies for a younger audience. In particular, it focuses on the Canadian sitcom How to Be Indie, which has gained wide international distribution and has been dubbed in different countries, including Italy, where the first season was broadcast on the satellite channel DeAKids as Essere Indie (2010). The author argues that in the absence of specific studies on the major issues raised by this kind of televisual product, a cross-disciplinary approach could prove useful, especially one that draws on subfields within translation studies, such as translation for children and postcolonial translation. After briefly illustrating the theoretical frames that might offer fruitful insights, a number of carefully selected examples focused mainly on culture-specific items are discussed, in order to identify the macro- and micro-strategies that have been activated in the Italian dubbed version of the sitcom to convey the multicultural identity of the characters as well as the humorous exchanges instantiated by diversity. The final aim of the contribution, despite its specific perspective, is the suggestion that theoretical reflections, rather than representing speculations for mere analytical purposes in a vacuum, could instead trigger a galvanising effect on researchers in AVT and translation studies, professionals, experts in related fields and teachers to understand the real needs of the end users of this type of audiovisual programme. In her concluding remarks, Manfredi makes a strong case in favour of the translational practice of dubbing, which can ultimately represent a powerful means of influencing young people, making them more accepting of diversity.

In his chapter entitled ‘Censorship and Manipulation of Subtitling in the Arab World’, Sattar Izwaini deals with the various cultural constraints and legal provisions that regulate the practices of translation and subtitling in the Arab world and that tend to act as conduits for censorship and manipulation. Although small differences in censorship levels can be observed throughout the various regions of the Arab world, attitudes towards the manipulation of subtitles tend to be rather uniform. Subtitling into Arabic is subject to cultural and legal constraints as well as institutional controls and self-censorship, and both national and foreign audiovisual productions undergo detailed linguistic scrutiny before they can be commercially released, in order to filter out any culturally problematic expressions that are perceived to go against prevalent sensitivities on matters such as religion, sex and politics. Based on a corpus of English-spoken audiovisual productions subtitled into Arabic, and focusing on three countries of different political, economic, social and cultural profiles – namely, Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates – the author discusses first the legislation in these countries and then examines a variety of illustrative examples that successfully reveal the way in which censorial forces manifest themselves at the textual level. Generalisation, substitution and deletion are the three main translation strategies used by the subtitlers to deal with thorny issues, and their implementation results in the levelling out of the target text, register shift, incoherence and failure to convey the pragmatic meaning of the original.

The second part of this book brings together four contributions, whose main objective is to shed light on the translation process as well as the reception of the audiovisual productions from the viewer’s perspective. The reception of subtitles is at the core of the contribution by Agnieszka Szarkowska, Izabela Krejtz and Krzysztof Krejtz, entitled ‘Do Shot Changes Really Induce the Rereading of Subtitles?’ In their chapter, the authors query a commonly upheld subtitling rule, frequently claimed in professional and academic circles, whereby a subtitle should not stay on screen over a shot change as this may trigger the rereading of the same subtitle. After reviewing the literature that is available on the subject and later conducting their own eye tracking experiment with a group of deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing participants, the authors conclude that although maintaining the subtitles over shot changes did not make the viewers in their study reread the subtitles, they did force them to alter their viewing patterns slightly, by inducing more gaze shifts between the subtitles and the image, thus interfering with the natural reading pattern.

The debate about the virtues or otherwise of subtitling versus dubbing has been the subject of numerous publications, with plentiful arguments in favour or against each of these two approaches. In her chapter, ‘Watching Translated Audiovisuals: Does Age Really Matter?’, Elisa Perego makes a distinct departure from previous discussions and prefers to take a more analytical outlook on the topic, by conducting empirical research with a group of viewers, aimed at finding out more about the cognitive and evaluative consequences of watching dubbed vs. subtitled films at different ages. After presenting the main characteristics of the experiments, and focusing primarily on older adult viewers, the chapter discusses the general implications of watching translated audiovisual material at different ages and under different circumstances. The results show that, although the overall performance of older adults declines with both translation methods, age effects are not especially evident in a particular condition, whether dubbing or subtitling. The contribution finishes with a discussion of the most important implications of such empirically grounded findings, acknowledges some of the limitations encountered during the study and advances a set of new potential lines of research.

Adopting a markedly cognitive angle in ‘Content Selection and Presentation: Considerations in Interlingual Subtitling Inquiry’, Mikołaj Deckert outlines and refines a descriptive model that would allow for conducting systematic analyses of how meaning is originally constructed in the source text and then reconstructed in the subtitling process. The model draws upon cognitive linguistics, a conglomerate of theories dating back to the 1970s, as a response to what could be fairly generally labelled as formal approaches, and pays special attention to the notions of conceptual content, construal and categorisation to demonstrate how subtitling shifts resulting from the application of (locally-based) procedures and (globally-oriented) strategies can be accounted for in a structured, methodologically principled manner. For the author, cognitive linguistics is a sensitive and powerful theoretical framework that can be used to yield convincing accounts of meaning construction in subtitling, without losing sight of the semiotic nature of the source material.

As advanced in the title, ‘Eye Tracking and the Process of Dubbing Translation’, Kristian Tangsgaard Hvelplund’s contribution reports on an eye tracking experiment focused on the process of translating for dubbing, during which translators had their eye movements monitored and recorded while they translated an excerpt of an animated television show from English into Danish. The aim of the study is to explore the production aspect of dubbing translation and to investigate the cognitive processes underlying the complex task of dubbing, by measuring fixation duration, visual transitions and pupil size in an attempt to account for the translators’ distribution of attention, their cognitive effort during the translation process as well as the processing flow in dubbing translation. The author finds that although the target text manuscript attracts the majority of visual attention during dubbing translation, the longer fixations have to do, in part, with the mechanical operation of typing; and that working with audiovisual material is in fact more cognitively demanding than any other part of dubbing as pupil sizes were considerably larger when the translators worked with the film sequence. The results point to the fact that working with aural and visual cues in addition to textual information in the form of dialogue scripts is likely to contribute to the increased effort on the translators’ cognitive systems.

The third part of this volume contains three contributions discussing the professional environment that characterises the practice of AVT in different countries. In the first of these contributions, ‘Audio Description Crisis Points: The Idea of Common European Audio Description Guidelines Revisited’, Iwona Mazur reports on the ADLAB project, an initiative financed by the European Union under the Lifelong Learning Programme to foster the training of audio describers and to design guidelines for the practice of AD at international level. Given a number of considerations, such as current AD practices, audience preferences in individual countries, interlingual and intercultural disparities, the various types of target audience or the fact that individual audiovisual products require unique solutions, the partners of the project propose to offer guidelines in the form of comprehensive AD strategies rather than standards or strict rules. To this end, the author coins and explains the notion of Audio Description Crisis Point, understood as an instance in the process of AD that is particularly challenging and thus requires a conscious decision on the part of the audio describer on how to tackle it. For the scholar, the proper identification of these crisis points is a crucial task in the production of a reliable set of AD guidelines, insofar as they inform about the most important aspects that should be included therein. One of the most salient features of this chapter is the design of a taxonomy made up of 14 Audio Description Crisis Points that foregrounds the main challenges involved in the practice of this professional activity and that can be used to vertebrate the drafting of guidelines that take into due consideration important aspects such as the nature of the audiovisual text, the audience design and the actual purpose of the AD, among others.

After briefly discussing the upsides of subtitling as one of the most used and suitable translational practices to make ever-increasing quantities of audiovisual materials accessible to foreign language speakers, the hearing impaired and the elderly, Agnese Morettini, in ‘Mapping Subtitling Competence: An Empirical Study of Companies’ Needs and Expectations’, embarks on an empirical incursion on the various skills and competences that are expected of professional subtitlers. Her study explores subtitling competence from an experiential perspective and has the benefit of taking the standpoint of market stakeholders into consideration. Working within the framework of qualitative content analysis, the scholar scrutinises a corpus of 48 job descriptions for subtitling and captioning jobs that have been drafted by subtitling companies worldwide, and draws valuable findings that are most significant from a didactic perspective as they can inform curriculum design and enhance students’ future employability prospects.

The final chapter in this third part, entitled ‘Developing Subtitling for the Deaf and the Hard-of-Hearing in Turkey’, is authored by Ali Gürkan and Jorge Díaz Cintas and examines the current state of affairs of SDH in Turkey, a fast-evolving information society. The contribution highlights the fact that one of the objectives of the Turkish government is to achieve full participation of all its citizens in this process, for which the management of information is at the base of new developments, policies and plans. And yet, accessibility to the media, especially in the case of TV, which tends to be the main or only source of information for most people with sensory disabilities, is one of the most neglected areas in the country. To appreciate the current situation, the authors look into the profile of members of the hearing impaired community as well as into the legislation that already exists nationwide on accessibility to information for people with sensory impairments. Pivotal to their argumentation is the understanding of SDH as an essential service in facilitating and guaranteeing full access to information for hearing impaired people and their proposal of a battery of suggestions aimed at enhancing the provision of this assistive service in a country like Turkey.

The fourth and last part of this collective book explores the pedagogical value of AVT and consists of two contributions. In their chapter, under the title ‘The ARDELE Project: Audio Description as a Didactic Tool to Improve (Meta)linguistic Competence in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning’, Ana Ibáñez Moreno and Anna Vermeulen present the ARDELE project, whose main objective is to explore the didactic potential that the use of AD may have in the classroom of Spanish as a foreign language for Dutch-speaking Belgian students. Adopting a task-based approach, the two scholars design and test several didactic units based on the AD of various clips taken from a film in Spanish and another in Dutch. Their controlled observation, together with the feedback provided by participants in various tests and questionnaires, allows them to conclude that these didactic units do indeed act as motivating and useful activities that enhance the awareness of the importance of idiomatic competence, considered by some linguists to be one of the most challenging skills for foreign language learners to apprehend. The results also show that AD-based activities boost metacognitive strategies, thereby increasing students’ insight into their own learning process.

The last contribution, entitled ‘Using Audiovisual Translation to Track Language Planning Developments: Flemish Public Broadcasting Subtitles from 1995 to 2012’, is co-authored by Reglindis De Ridder and Eithne O’Connell, who explore how AVT studies, lexicography and corpus linguistics can make a contribution to the field of sociolinguistics, by focusing on Dutch as one of the languages used in the subtitles commercialised in Belgium. Against the backdrop of the transnational Dutch publishing industry’s established practice of consistently avoiding Belgian Dutch features, the authors of this chapter embark on a diachronic study focused on the subtitling carried out by the Flemish public service broadcaster in Belgium between 1995 and 2012, with the objective of establishing whether, and if so, to what extent, the broadcaster makes use of marked Belgian Dutch lexical items in its subtitles, thus providing an important counterbalance to published Dutch texts and contributing to the development of a richer, more inclusive Dutch written standard. Using corpus linguistics techniques, their research yields concrete new data as the authors are able to track trends relating to the use of the Belgian variety of Dutch in interlingual subtitles of fiction programmes aired by the Flemish public service broadcaster, and it demonstrates how productive links can be forged between subtitling and corpus linguistics, on the one hand, and sociolinguistics (language planning and minority media studies), on the other.

Despite its relative youth in scholarly debates, AVT has certainly come of age academically in recent years and can be considered a consolidated area of research within the broader area of Translation Studies. The blossoming of AVT as a discipline is accompanied by an evolution in key topics and debates and, if early studies on the field used to concentrate on the distinctiveness and autonomy of AVT, interdisciplinarity and cross-fertilisation are nowadays harbinger of a distinct way forward. The traditional focus of the pioneering scholarly studies conducted in the field of AVT tended to be biased in favour of the analysis of the role played by language, the challenges encountered when carrying out the linguistic transfer and the translational strategies activated by the translators to overcome them. With the passing of the years, the scope of the research has widened considerably to encompass many other aspects that directly impinge on the transfer that takes place during AVT.

This selective compilation of 12 contributions offers a rounded vision of some of the ways in which AVT can be approached from an academic, professional and educational point of view. The studies herein provide a stimulating and thought-provoking account of some of the most representative themes that are currently being researched in the field of AVT, while also pointing to new directions of potential research, such as the cognitive approaches discussed above. A conscious effort has been made not only to cover cultural and linguistic approaches to traditional domains of AVT studies, but also to look into lesser-known areas of research that are attracting substantial interest from various stakeholders and gradually becoming part of the remit of AVT. In this respect, the chapters contained in this volume tackle the field of AVT from a plural, comprehensive and most up-to-date perspective, speaking of a rich and complex academic subject in the making, broadening our existing knowledge on AVT, reflecting the many crossroads and junctions it presently faces and adumbrating some of the issues that will become topical in the near future in this fascinating and flourishing discipline.

Jorge Díaz Cintas and Kristijan Nikolić

References

Bywood, L., Georgakopoulou, P. and Etchegoyhen, T. (2017) Embracing the threat: Machine translation as a solution for subtitling. Perspectives. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2017.1291695.

Díaz Cintas, J. (2015) Technological strides in subtitling. In S-W. Chan (ed.) Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Technology (pp. 632–643). London: Routledge.

Incalcaterra McLoughlin, L., Biscio, M. and Ní Mhainnín, M.A. (eds) (2011) Audiovisual Translation – Subtitles and Subtitling: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Peter Lang.

O’Hagan, M. (2016) Massively open translation: Unpacking the relationship between technology and translation in the 21st century. International Journal of Communication 10, 929–946.

Perego, E. (ed.) (2012) Eye Tracking in Audiovisual Translation. Rome: Aracne.