30.1608, Review: Translation: Gambier, Ramos Pinto (2018)
The LINGUIST List
linguist at listserv.linguistlist.org
Fri Apr 12 19:43:51 UTC 2019
LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1608. Fri Apr 12 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 30.1608, Review: Translation: Gambier, Ramos Pinto (2018)
Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Student Moderator: Jeremy Coburn
Managing Editor: Becca Morris
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Peace Han, Nils Hjortnaes, Yiwen Zhang, Julian Dietrich
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org
************************************** LINGUIST List Support **************************************
Fund Drive 2019
29 years of LINGUIST List! The annual Fund Drive is on!
Please support the LINGUIST List to ensure we can continue to deliver important information to your mailbox.
Every amount counts:
https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
Editor for this issue: Jeremy Coburn <jecoburn at linguistlist.org>
================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2019 15:43:26
From: YI CHEN [ellejennycy at gmail.com]
Subject: Audiovisual Translation
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36467037
Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-2807.html
EDITOR: Yves Gambier
EDITOR: Sara Ramos Pinto
TITLE: Audiovisual Translation
SUBTITLE: Theoretical and methodological challenges
SERIES TITLE: Benjamins Current Topics 95
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018
REVIEWER: YI CHEN, Macquarie University
SUMMARY
“Audiovisual Translation: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges” is edited
by Yves Gambier and Sara Ramos Pinto, both of whom are prolific researchers in
translation studies. The book collects ten journal articles previously
published in Target in 2016, and is intended to provide a brief introduction
to the current research of Audiovisual Translation (AVT), touching on the
topics of translation quality, discourse analysis and multimodal analysis,
action research, pragmatics, psycholinguistic studies, and even gender study.
Thus, it is quite evident that this book is intended to engage anyone who
might be interested in AVT, including both researchers and industrial
practitioners.
Paper 1: Descriptive translation studies of audio visual translation:
21st-century issues, challenges and opportunities (Alexandra Assis Rosa)
This paper offers a brief introduction of Descriptive Translation Studies
(DTS) in AVT by discussing some theoretical and methodological issues,
challenges and opportunities in the field. The article is divided into five
parts. It starts with a list of DTS principles and the complexity of AVT and
then provides a selective overview of DTS research on AVT. That is, the
result of keyword searching on “audiovisual and DTS” suggests that “DTS
apparently has only just started to be applied to AVT” (p. 14). Part Four is
the focus of this article. It discusses the relevance of DTS on AVT by
quoting two journal articles (Jorge Diaz-Cintas, 2004; Pym, 2001), and then
raises concerns on semiotic complexity of the audiovisual text and application
of conceptual framework of DTS on AVT. For example, the systematic descriptive
analysis of AVT corpora may prove to be impractical due to the complexity and
diversity of the research object. Other difficulties may arise due to the
interdisciplinarity of DTS in AVT, specifically affected by some social
factors including the need of research collaboration, lack of project funding
and absence of assessments from linguistics or literary studies for
publication. Therefore, the author suggests that DTS is currently less
favoured in the field of AVT, as its main conceptual framework is not
adequately applied. The author argues that AVT studies following a descriptive
approach are valuable as these researches can be “instrumentalized in the
medium or long term for the applied purpose of producing better AVT practice
or training better AVT translators” (p. 20).
Paper 2: Machine translation quality in an audiovisual context (Aljoscha
Burchardt, Arle Lommel, Lindsay Bywood, Kim Harris and Maja Popovic)
The paper presents probably the most popular topic of Machine Translation (MT)
in an audiovisual context by discussing why the use of MT is rather difficult
in AVT, specifically in the field of subtitling. The paper also presents some
possible tools and methods for assessing MT quality. An overview of the
technicality of MT shows that most MT systems are actually based on the
statistical probabilities learnt through analysing large parallel corpora. By
contrast, AVT of subtitles and dubbing scripts is based on an open domain. Its
oral style and lack of visual and other contextual features makes it
impossible to accurately calculate predictability of the content at all
levels, including grammar, structure and vocabulary. The article also lists
some examples. Accordingly, while discussing MT quality, the authors suggest
that Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) is a promising approach and
propose a simpler and adapted metric for evaluating MT in the AVT context. The
adapted metric makes a good framework for the relevant studies.
Paper 3: The multimodal approach in audiovisual translation (Christopher
Taylor)
The paper is composed of five parts, with Part Two and Three as its focus to
explore the application of multimodal analysis on AVT. For multimodal text
analysis, it is important to identify various semiotic resources by taking a
narrative approach and adapting linguistic, semiotic and cultural
perspectives. In other words, a more holistic approach is required when
multimodality is used to provide input for AVT. The article reviews a
multimodal transcription which is devised by Thibault (2000) and later revised
by Taylor (2003) for AVT research. Specially, the transcription is presented
in a grid containing a detailed description of each screenshot. However, the
author also points out that this method may be useful for understanding
blended semiotic resources, but highly impractical to describe any audiovisual
texts of longer duration. Eventually, the author proposes a concept of phasal
analysis to replace screenshot-based description as a more manageable tool of
multimodal analysis.
Paper 4: Action research: so much to account for (Joselia Neves)
The paper introduces Action Research (AR) on AVT, specifically subtitling for
a Portuguese deaf audience by presenting and discussing a museum project
called the MCCB project. The article introduces AR as a valuable tool in
translation study and emphasizes its characteristics of being “collaborative,
responsive, democratic, developmental and capacity building” (Stern, 2013, p.
228). Then, the article focuses on introducing the MCCB project as a
participatory action research, in which AVT researchers’ role is set to
“develop communication strategies, design models, test materials and arrive at
solutions” (p. 56). Specifically during AR, the research topic is derived
from the social environment and based on the researcher’s habitus, directly
affecting the AVT products to be developed for the museum. It is believed that
AR is a dialogic approach which integrates audiovisual digital materials with
analogic tangible realities in this project. The author suggests that AR
contributes to AVT practice and in the case of the project of MCCB, it brings
multiple benefits, academically and financially.
Paper 5: From Translation Studies and audiovisual translation to media
accessibility: some research trends (Aline Remael, Nina Reviers and Reinhild
Vandekerckhove)
The paper discusses the AVT study by focusing on recent developments on
subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH), mainly on intralingual
subtitling, and giving a comprehensive account of research trends in Audio
Description (AD) for the blind and visually impaired. For SDH, large and small
scaled projects have been conducted and achieved notable development in live
subtitling for intralingual speech cognition. In comparison, researches on
interlingual live subtitling are relatively limited, possibly due to the lack
of available materials. Comparing to SDH, the study on AD seems to face more
challenges as most projects are too heterogeneous to work on. Eventually it
will have a hard time developing into a fully-fledged discipline. The authors
suggest that the future trend in this field lies in reception research and
multimodality and the application of technology, preferably at intralingual
studies such as text-to-speech technologies, use of mobile devices for the
distribution of AD.
Paper 6: Imagined spectators: the importance of policy for audiovisual
translation research (Carol O’Sullivan)
This paper introduces some theoretical and methodological challenges in the
research of AVT policy. The paper gives a broad definition of translation
policy and describes its scope. Then, it focuses on the research of policy in
Descriptive Translation Studies. The article reviews some research and
asserts that policy research in AVT is largely interdisciplinary and can
benefit from studies on translation policy. When discussing policy issues in
dubbing and subtitling, the author argues that the traditional view of dubbing
as a strong nationalistic system and subtitling as way of promoting foreign
language cannot reflect the diversity of current practice regarding national
policies. The paper also reviews the methods in AVT studies, including
archival research methods, reception studies, practitioner research and
surveys, which are primarily extensive descriptive works. It concludes with
the argument that government decrees are part of the policy. Some challenges
and possible trends in policy research on AVT shows that the descriptive
research in AVT policy should be recommended in current AVT practice.
Paper 7: Psycholinguistics and audiovisual translation (Jan-Louis Kruger)
This paper offers an overview of research in AVT from a psycholinguistic
perspective. The article starts with an introduction to AVT and
psycholinguistic studies. The article argues that a psycholinguistic
perspective is able to aid AVT research by focusing on investigation of what
happens during the processing of subtitles, or how subtitling affects the
behaviour of viewers. The paper reviews 10 journal articles on the application
of eye-tracking on AVT, touching on various topics including different reading
behaviours of adults and children in subtitles, comparison of intralingual and
interlingual subtitling, the chucking units in subtitling, receptive
difference of subtitling between L1 and L2 audience, ESL students’ cognitive
load in reading subtitling, and reading index of subtitles. The article
concludes with recommendation of future psycholinguistic methodologies for
AVT.
Paper 8: Cross-cultural pragmatics and audiovisual translation (Marie-Noelle
Guillot)
This paper discusses the language in AVT from a cross-cultural pragmatics
perspective. The article focuses on the contrastive pragmatics work of
politeness in AVT. Linguistically, two types of studies are mentioned, namely
studies that explicitly identify pragmatic components and those that integrate
pragmatics incidentally. The author also reviews two articles (Hatim & Mason,
1997; Pinto, 2010) and discusses the issues of politeness and directness in
AVT. The cultural asynchrony is discussed, focusing on the challenges of
making functional equivalence in a target text. The paper acknowledges the
contribution of pragmatic approaches in AVT research as bringing theoretical
and methodological resources for identifying issues and rationalizing
observations and findings, but also emphasizes the need of reception studies
for better understanding of the researched object.
Paper 9: The importance of being relevant? A cognitive-pragmatic framework for
conceptualizing audiovisual translation (Sabine Braun)
The paper discusses the AVT process and the application of relevance theory
(RT) and mental model theory (MMT) in understanding the AVT process. Using a
cognitive-pragmatic framework constructed in RT and MMT, the article argues
against the general conceptualization of AVT as being partial and constrained.
Specifically, RT and MMT are claimed as being complementary in modelling
discourse process. MMT is for human reasoning as individuals construct mental
models of corresponding situations in understanding discourse. RT is for
assumption-based comprehension process in which individuals choose the
optimally relevant way of communication. In this way, both theories can be
applied to multimodal discourse and helps to deconstruct the process in AVT.
Then, it is argued that AVT is not a filtering process, but a process
involving an in-depth analysis of all visual-verbal relations, assessment of
different translation strategies, knowledge of target audience, and context of
film and contribution of all modes, to avail an optimally relevant rendition.
In all, AVT is considered as multimodal processing and requires a holistic
comprehension of all cues from different modes.
Paper 10: The ‘engendering’ approach in audio-visual translation (Marcella De
Marco)
The paper provides a broad review of AVT research from a gender perspective.
The only research on AVT from an engendering approach is mentioned in this
paper. The research is identified to explore gender bias not only through the
linguistic dimension but also through visual and audio one from a corpus
compiled with 10 films and in three different languages. The paper then argues
that the lack of AVT research from a gender perspective is mainly associated
with film distribution, funding and policy issues as the distributed and
translated film are often gender-exclusive or offensive. The author concludes
with a call to raise awareness from both professionals and scholars about
gender issues in AVT.
EVALUATION
This book is well presented with articles carefully selected for offering a
nearly panoramic view of the current AVT studies. The book does not focus on
one or two particular approaches or research methods. Instead, it selects one
article for each of the selected approaches in AVT research, introducing AVT
from linguistic, social linguistic, psycholinguistic, and even cognitive
perspectives. In addition, the book also presents different research methods
used in AVT studies, such as AR, discourse analysis, and multimodal analysis.
Some of articles in this book also touch on heated topics like MT and the
impact of digital materials on AVT practice. In this way, the collection of
the articles successfully reveals the complexity and diversity of AVT practice
and the interdisciplinary and heterogeneous nature of the AVT research.
Indeed, although the book does not account for all approaches and
methodologies in AVT, it is comprehensive enough to keep readers informed
about the development that has been achieved in the field. In this sense, the
book is highly recommended for students, teachers, researchers, industrial
practitioners or any enthusiasts who start to explore their interests in AVT.
That is, the book would be wonderful reading material to orient its readers
into AVT research or to help them narrow down the scope of a prospective
research project. Yet, it is also necessary for us to admit that the book
cannot provide further assistance, or detailed references, to its readers on
how specifically different approaches or methods are applied in AVT, as it
does not include many empirical works. Clearly, the book focuses only on
describing the landscape of AVT studies. Thus, it would be reasonable to state
that the book well serves its objective.
REFERENCES
Diaz-Cintas, Jorge. 2004. “In Search of a Theoretical Framework for the Study
of Audiovisual Translation.” In Topics in Audiovisual Translation, ed. by
Pilar Orero, 21-34, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hatim, Basil, and Ian Mason. 1997. The Translator as Communicator. London:
Routledge.
Pinto, Derrin. 2010. “Lost in Subtitle Translations: The Case of Advice in the
English Subtitles of Spanish Films.” Intercultural Pragmatics 7 (2): 257-277.
Pym, Anthony. 2001. “Four Remarks on Translation Research and Multimedia.” In
(Multi) Media Translation, ed. by Yves Gambier, and Henrik Gottieb, 275-282,
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Stern, Thomas. 2013. “What is Good Action Research?” Reflections about Quality
Criteria.” In Action Research, Innovation and Change. International
Perspectives across Disciplines, ed. by Thomas Stern, Andrew Townsend, Franz
Rauch, and Angela Schuster, 202-220. London: Routledge.
Taylor, Christopher. 2003. “Multimodal Transcription in the Analysis,
Translation and Subtitling of Italian Films.” The Translator 9(2): 191-206.
Thibalt, Paul. 2000. “The Multimodal Transcription of a Television
Advertisement: Theory and Practice.” In Baldry 2000, 311-385.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Yi Chen took her PhD in Translation and Interpreting Studies from Macquarie
University, Australia. She was a lecturer (on leave) in Xi’an International
Studies University, China and is currently working as the project manager in
Sydney Institute of Interpreting and Translation, Australia. Her research
interests include interpreting studies, discourse analysis, Systemic
Functional Linguistics and identity formation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*************************** LINGUIST List Support ***************************
The 2019 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
https://iufoundation.fundly.com/the-linguist-list-2019
Let's make this a short fund drive!
Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1608
----------------------------------------------------------
More information about the LINGUIST
mailing list