PANEL 1
AUDIO-VISUAL TRANSLATION
Chair: Aishah Mubaraki, University of Leeds
Translating Knowledge: A Study of Subtitling Chinese Open Courses for International Audiences
Yuan Zou (Queen's University of Belfast, UK)
Open courses convey knowledge to everyone on the Internet regardless of the barriers of time and space. Translation of open courses, also called subtitling, enables knowledge to cross the borders of languages and cultures, contributing to global knowledge dissemination and communication in a broader sense. Currently, research focusing on the subtitling of open courses and lectures is far from sufficient, and there is very little research on the specific angle of Chinese-to-English subtitling under the context of the Belt and Road Initiative. Thus, I specifically look into subtitling Chinese open courses for international audiences and how they understand China based on these courses. My research takes 26 of the open courses on the online teaching websites Coursera and edX as case studies. I investigate subtitling in the following two ways: first, how subtitles influence the transfer and reception of the knowledge; second, how subtitles represent the ideological national and academic images in the course. Due to the nature of subtitle and lecture, there is limited space and time to convey messages on the screen. Therefore, it is crucial for subtitlers to decide when and how to mediate cultural references for international viewers. This paper has developed from Pedersen’s model (2010), to further explore the significance of transculturality, how to appraise the well-knownness and transculturality level of cultural references, and the model’s application on subtitling Chinese open courses. My aim is to improve the quality of subtitles and help international audiences gain a better understanding of open courses.
The Role of Non-representational Subtitling within Transnational Communities of Interest: A Case Study of Cultural Brokering YouTube Vlogs
Seryun Lee (University of Manchester, UK)
The affordances of digital technologies have empowered ordinary people to engage in media prosumption in pursuit of their individual interests and agendas and social networking with like-minded people. For instance, an increasing number of people have produced and circulated vlogs, which reflect their personal and mundane experiences. In particular, some media prosumers translate their content in order to reach out to geographically dispersed audiences and make connections and form collectivities with them. Furthermore, those prosumers’ translation as part of their self-representation in public often incorporates innovative translation practices prioritising ‘the expression of affinity with their audience’ rather than ‘referential accuracy’ (Pérez-González 2014: 235).
This study explores translated vlogs produced by British YouTubers, whose proclaimed goal is to introduce Korean and British cultures to each other. In other words, through the production and dissemination of their videos, they try to play a role as cultural brokers, who perform ‘the act of bridging, linking, or mediating between groups and persons’ (Jezewski 1990: 497) to help the constituents in each group overcome lingua-cultural barriers and facilitate mutual understanding. Specifically, this study examines the YouTubers’ non-representational subtitling, which does not necessarily seek to reproduce the original speech into the target language with accuracy; instead, it contains extra information that is not actually narrated in video content or media prosumers’ own thoughts. Drawing on selected video samples, this study illustrates how their non-representational subtitles help geographically dispersed audiences understand lingua-cultural differences and facilitate interactions between YouTubers and viewers. I will argue that non-representational subtitling as a form of ‘affective labour’ (Hardt 1999; Hardt and Negri 2004), i.e. immaterial work that engenders certain feelings and social networks, influences viewers’ engagement with media content and fellow viewers and contributes to the formation of transnational communities of interest.
Character (Re) design from Source to Target Multimodal Text: The Chicano Gangster Stereotype as a Case Study
Dora Renna (University of Verona, Italy)
This paper aims to expand the scope of research on audiovisual language and translation by taking into consideration the relationship between the audiovisual text and other modes characterising the audiovisual product. The complexity of this kind of product calls for an analytical framework that makes it possible to deal with multiple modes simultaneously. Although intuitively
applicable to qualitative research, this kind of analysis has so far been difficult to achieve in larger corpora. In particular, the main focus of this thesis is character design in movies. A character is a recognizable, stereotyped diegetic device, composed of audiovisual as well as textual elements. Movies rely heavily on stereotyped characters to convey messages to the audience and fulfil a specific communicative function based on a set of shared assumptions. The analysis will take as a case study a selection of American movies released between 1988 and 1993 and dubbed into Italian, featuring the stereotypical character of the Chicano gangster.
The methodology is informed by descriptive translation studies and multimodality, as well as corpus-based analysis and translation of fictional nonstandard varieties. The relationship between linguistic elements and non-textual elements will be analysed to understand the way that intermodal relationships are built in both texts. This will shed light on the communicative meaning conveyed by the character in the multimodal text, and the way it is preserved or transformed through the audiovisual translation process. The analysis will have an initially quantitative approach, so as to outline a general trend in the character design and re-design within the analysed corpus. The data will then be reviewed and interpreted, in order to understand how specific linguistic choices in a multimodal environment are linked to the linguacultural context that generated them.
Developing Audiovisual Mediation: Interlingual and Intralingual Subtitling to Increase Accessibility of Videos to International Viewers
Pietro Luigi Iaia, Sara Tedesco (University of Salento, Italy)
This paper illustrates the results of a case study implemented at the University of Salento, concerning the adoption of subtitles “as a didactic aid” (Caimi 2006) and as a tool to develop intercultural communication through audiovisual texts and English as a ‘lingua franca’ (Seidlhofer 2011). In particular, we examine the intralingual and interlingual translations for the subtitles of the video Mafia Clans Reign of Terror in Corrupt Naples, which is uploaded to YouTube. The research hypothesis is that the official subtitles, which are displayed only when non-native English speakers take the floor, preserve features of formal register and editorial additions that may undermine their readability and the video’s accessibility to international viewers. For these reasons, an alternative rendering was produced by a postgraduate student of Translation and Interpreting Studies, to make the news report more accessible to addressees that are characterized by different levels of English knowledge. The analysis of the alternative target script will enquire into the extent to which the strategies of lexical and structural simplification and condensation (Pedersen 2011), along with the selection of specific verb tenses and aspects, are meant to enhance the implied recipients’ accessibility. Finally, the examination of the characteristics of the English variation adopted in the new subtitles will lead to the introduction of the notion ‘audiovisual mediation’, defining an alternative approach to audiovisual translation, which stems from a critical examination of source scripts in order to: (i) make the illocutionary force (Austin 1962) accessible and acceptable to the implied, international audience, and (ii) overcome the conventional associations between dubbing and domestication (Paolinelli and Di Fortunato 2005), and subtitling and foreignization (Denton and Ciampi 2012).