Presentation

One of the basic assumptions of translation studies is that the practice of translation involves taking a source text and carrying out some kind of transfer operation to produce a target text. Like a race car driver, the translator goes from texte de départ to texte d’arrivée. Yet this is one of several binary oppositions in translation studies—along with, for example, national/international and monolingual/multilingual (see Meylaerts, 2009)—that are now being criticized as too reductive. The contributions to this issue of TTR, each in their own way, call into question the idea of a clear-cut delineation between source and target text and indeed, between the cultures from which they emerge and to which they are linked. Instead, they posit translation as a complex semiotic encounter involving the interaction of multiple channels of information (visual and auditory) and types of signs (verbal and non-verbal). As we move from a print culture to an electronic one, the very idea of text and the vocabulary used to refer to it have undergone change. Bertrand Gervais notes that while some definitions of text emphasize language and writing, others—like the one he proposes—take a broader stance: “an organized ensemble of signifying elements for a given community” (2008, n.p.). He points out three key aspects of this definition: a text is constituted as such because it draws on a set of conventions known to its interpretive community; it exists not on its own but in relation to a reader; and it requires some sort of material support in order to be transmitted. But there is a further aspect to this definition that is particularly relevant to the theme of this issue: a text is not a single element but an ensemble or assemblage of elements. This is especially true in the digital environment, where texts are becoming increasingly complex and hybrid, with the Internet being characterized by hypertexts—texts that are displayed on electronic devices and contain links to multiple levels of content that users can access in a non-linear and non-sequential manner—and by iconotexts—in which writing, images and sounds are interwoven to various degrees and share the same space, like on a web page. Clearly, such an environment creates challenges for translation: the process no longer involves producing an entirely new text that in some way mirrors the original, but instead is concerned with assembling old and new elements into a cohesive whole. For audiovisual translation techniques, it may be fruitful to draw on the notion of assemblage as a way to go beyond the traditional thinking of translation as performing a substitution (in dubbing, of translated lip-synced dialogue for the original dialogue) or as being an addition (in subtitling, of written text on the screen to translate the dialogue) while leaving the rest of the film intact. An audiovisual whole constructed from light and sound is disassembled and put back together as another, different audiovisual whole. In the first contribution to this issue, Sari Kokkola points out that subtitlers tend to focus on the linguistic features of audiovisual documents—the spoken words and occasional onscreen written information like letters and street signs—while overlooking ways in which the acoustic and visual dimensions interact to create meaning. Drawing on phenomenology as a method to study the role of sound in film translation, Kokkola presents the concepts of embodiment and materiality. Film viewing is embodied in the sense that films are not only looked at but perceived by the body as a whole, experientially. And before viewers can understand the meaning of a film, they engage with it at the material level, encountering its physical characteristics. Speech, for …