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“Audiovisual translation comes of age,” proclaims Jorge Díaz Cintas in his introduction to Between Text and Image: Updating Research in Screen Translation, citing the ubiquity of the screen in modern society and the technological developments that have made audiovisual products pervasive in the past decade. The need for audiovisual translation (AVT) to bring these products to wider audiences has grown accordingly; this has occasioned a corresponding surge of interest in research on AVT as a subdiscipline of translation studies, one that has its own concerns and methodologies. Evidence of the current enthusiasm for AVT can be found in the decision by John Benjamins to publish two edited collections of essays on this field in 2008: the previously mentioned Between Text and Image, which grew out of a conference on recent research in screen translation held in Forlì, Italy; and The Didactics of Audiovisual Translation, a volume edited by Jorge Díaz Cintas that focuses on translator training for audiovisual material.

The first publication, edited by Delia Chiaro, Christine Heiss and Chiara Bucaria, highlights the pioneering role of the University of Bologna in bringing together research on film and on translation starting as early as 1993. The Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in Translation, Languages and Cultures recently developed Forlixt 1, a multimedia corpus that combines electronic versions of films with transcripts of the dialogue and subtitles to allow researchers to extract data on audiovisual translation patterns and strategies. As of June 2006, it contained 30 feature-length fiction films, including original productions in Italian, German, and French; the transcriptions amount to about 300,000 words, making it comparable in size to other Italian spoken corpora. Two articles on Forlixt 1 are included in the first section of Between Text and Image, along with a paper describing INTCA, a prototype for a Catalan-English electronic dictionary of interjections, based on a corpus of television sitcoms in Catalan and in English dubbed into Catalan. These articles point to the potential of electronic and multimedia corpora as highly sophisticated AVT research tools.

The other sections present articles grouped according to approach: linguistic; empirical; cultural and psycholinguistic; and socio-economic. Noteworthy are the empirical studies by Rachele Antonini, Chiara Bucaria, and Flavia Cavaliere that draw on the methods of marketing research to examine audience perception of AV products. For example, Antonini questioned viewers on how well they understood “dubbese,” the standardized spoken Italian found in dubbed films and television programs, in response to concerns about its impact on language learning, particularly among children. Also noteworthy is an essay by Elena Di Giovanni in the section on cultural and psycholinguistic approaches, which makes a heartfelt plea for “abusive subtitling” – a term coined by Abé Mark Nornes (1999) to refer to subtitling that draws attention to itself and does not hide the film’s foreign origin – as particularly appropriate for documentary films on human rights.

While most of the papers focus on present or future concerns, Between Text and Image contains a rare look back at historical trends in AVT research – a sign of the growing maturity of the field. Written by Yves Gambier, the paper pinpoints 1995 as a watershed for AVT for three reasons: the centenary of cinema, which was marked by various publications and conferences; activism by linguistic minority groups in Europe, who recognized the role of audiovisual media in promoting identity; and technological changes, particularly the transition from analog to digital media. Gambier also discusses the challenges facing both researchers and practitioners, noting that certain key concepts of translation studies, such as text, authorship, and translation norms, need to be rethought when they are applied to AVT. He concludes by admonishing translators for their slow response to the changing media situation in our image-dominated world, whereby power is shifting from large media owners to cultural mediators like translators who work with the vast range of AV products.

One of the challenges mentioned by Gambier is translator training, which is precisely the focus of the second book on AVT published by John Benjamins in 2008, The Didactics of Audiovisual Translation. Edited by the prolific Jorge Díaz Cintas, it builds on the wealth of material published in AVT in recent years as well as current interest in training to explore the intersection between the two. In Part 1, it suggests that AV translators would benefit from further training in two areas: the semiotics of the audiovisual text and screenwriting. On the latter subject, Patrick Catrysse and Yves Gambier argue that translators should be familiar with the functions of film dialogue and the narrative and rhetorical strategies used by screenwriters, while Aline Remael makes a distinction between fictional dialogue and the impromptu speech found in documentaries and current affairs programming.

The longest section of the book is Part 2, which addresses practical concerns by describing specific AVT programs at higher-education institutions in Europe and offering suggestions for classroom activities. Thus it contains such articles as Bartoll and Orero’s description of the online subtitling module offered by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Anna Matamala’s account of a university course on voice-over, a hitherto neglected mode of AVT. Other articles focus on dubbing and translation for the video game industry. The book also comes with a CD-ROM containing film excerpts, exercises, and a sample clip with audio description.

At the same time as it provides concrete ideas for teaching AVT in translation programs, The Didactics of Audiovisual Translation expands its purview to cover the relatively new field of media accessibility and the use of translated AV materials in language learning. The pioneering articles in Part 3 give guidelines on how to train language professionals in subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH) and audio description for the blind (AD), the two main forms of AVT intended for people with sensory impairments. Part 4 looks at the potential for subtitled audiovisual materials to be used effectively in second-language acquisition, both in the classroom through techniques such as reversed subtitling (i.e., watching a film with audio in the learner’s native language and subtitles in the second language), and in unguided learning situations such as home viewing of DVDs.

Both of these publications reflect a European perspective: most of the articles in Between Text and Image were written by scholars based in Italy, while those in The Didactics of Audiovisual Translation cover wider ground, with contributions from Europe – mostly Spain and Britain – as well as South Africa, the United States and Brazil. One significant difference in the North American perspective is that audiovisual translation tends not to incorporate issues related to media accessibility – although both audio description and subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (called captioning in North America) were invented in the United States. Nonetheless, readers from all parts of the world will find much valuable information in these two publications. Achieving a welcome balance between theory and practice, they represent a coming of age for AVT in that they go beyond the limited focus on dubbing and subtitling of previous decades to consider numerous modes of audiovisual translation from a variety of approaches, opening many avenues for further research.