Lingua Inglese, curriculum orientale - Appunti

Disciplinary and industrial foundations: AVT theories, methods and issues - Part I

Indice

• Mapping an evolving conceptual network
  • The widening remit of audiovisual translation, pag. 1
  • Modalities of audiovisual translation, pag. 2
  • Assistive forms of audiovisual translation, pag. 5
• Audiovisual translation as a site of representational practice
  • Representational practice in AVT: choice vs conventions, pag. 6
  • Silent films: from ‘presentationalism’ to ‘diegis’, pag. 7
  • Talking films: representational implication of synchronized sound, pag. 9
  • Suturing translation in the era of mass media, pag. 11
• Audiovisual translation as a site of interventionist practice
  • Audiovisual intervention, pag. 12
  • Key concept for the study of interventionist in audiovisual translation, pag. 13
  • Audiovisual translation cybercultures, pag. 18

Approfondimenti > Censorship of Japanese anime, pag. 19

The widening remit of AVT

Abbreviations

• AVT: audiovisual translation
• CS: culture specific
• CSR: culture specific reference
• SA: source audience
• SC: source culture
• ST: source text
• TA: target audience
• TC: target culture
• TL: target language
• TT: target text
• AVMS: audiovisual materials

Audiovisual materials are non-book materials like tapes, slides, films which are renewed and recent. They differ from traditional translation materials, such as books, because AVMS can be downloaded and uploaded. They can also be found on internet platforms like YouTube, Vimeo or TikTok. AVMS is also anything that can be seen at the cinema, on TV and produced for home entertainment.

AVMS are very recent materials: they began in the 1990s and in the last ten years they have grown and become more prominent.

The affective response

One of the first example of AVMS is Train pulling into a station. It is the demonstration of why we really enjoy AVMS: they produce on us an affective response, an emotional reaction. In front of the very first scene of the film, people at the cinema were scared because of the arrival of a train because they thought the train would hit them, so they couldn’t distinguish fiction from reality.

Some critics to the affective response:

• F. R. Leaves criticized that, because of the affective response, the active use of mind does not take place;
• Mann said that audiences can only react but not reflect on what the films show.

The widening remit of audiovisual translation

During the last fifteen years, AVT has been the faster growing strand of translation studies. This induced the creation of specialized post-graduate courses, doctoral research, summer schools, and conferences about the AVT.

The exponential growth was caused by two main developments:

• Communication technology has become an integral part of social life. This is attested by the ever bigger impact of audiovisual content against the circulation of materials published in print media.
• A need for:
  • Robust theoretical frameworks to assist with the conceptualization of new text-types;
  • New methodological approaches to guide the research and analysis of audiovisual data;
  • A better understanding of new discourse communities formed around the production and consumption of audiovisual text-types.

The terminological changes

The expansion process can be traced by observing the changes in terminology (Chaume Varela 2004):

• The development of cinema as an art form brought the use of the terms film dubbing or film translation (Fodor 1976, Snell Hornby 1988).
• The advent of television as a private commodity and its transformation into a mass medium of communication and entertainment provided terms such as film and TV translation (Delabastita 1989) and media translation (Eguíluz et al. 1994).
• The computerization of audiovisual texts and the popularization of digital media content to be viewed on the screen of a computer or a portable electronic device introduced the terms screen translation (Mason 1989, O’Connell 2007) and multimedia translation (Gambier and Gottlieb 2001).
• Specialists have also proposed:
  • A term that signals the medial restrictions under which the audiovisual translator operates - constrained translation (Titford 1982, Mayoral et al. 1988).
  • A term to foreground the transformative dimension of audiovisual mediation, as translators often need to distance themselves from the original text to supply for new audiences - transadaptation (Gambier 2003).
  • A term to preserve the immersive function of media content - transcreation (Bernal Merino 2006).

Studies have recently suggested that the term audiovisual translation (AVT) has been gaining ground in recent years and is fast becoming the standard referent.

Modalities of audiovisual translation

Subtitling

Conventionally, each of the snippets into which the original language speech, whether in the form of dialogue or narration, has to be delivered in synchrony with the text superimposed on visual footage corresponding fragment of spoken language. ‘Bilingual subtitle’ convey two language versions of the source speech.

Intertitles (title cards)

Intertitles, or title cards, were the first type of subtitling. They can be of two different types:

• Dialogue intertitles are used to convey characters’ dialogue, so we read a dialogue in the movie;
• Expository intertitles provide descriptive or narrative material so we can understand what is going on the scene or when the scene is going on.

Diasemiotic or intermodal form of AVT

Subtitling has been defined as a disemiotic or intermodal form of audiovisual translation, as it involves the shift from a spoken to a written medium. Given that people generally speak much faster than they read, this shift has important consequences for viewers’ experience of translated audiovisual text. Studies have demonstrated that subtitling can only accommodate 60 percent of the source spoken text.

This explains why they are normally worded as condensed, streamlined versions of the original dialogue. These medial restrictions dictate that the number of characters used in each subtitle should be commensurate with the duration of the corresponding speech unit and the reading speed of the target audience.

The compromise of the personal pragmatics

The condensation and synthesis of the original spoken dialogue compromise the interpersonal pragmatics of subtitled dialogue. Audiovisual translators tend to disambiguate instances of conversational ambiguity or indirectness. Conforming to these constraints is often detrimental to the dynamics of dramatic characterization, especially in the case of films or TV drama.

Independent film directors have raised criticism against the creative limitations derived from these constraints. So, deconstructing commercial subtitling standards is the strategy for creators to signal their resistance to mainstream subtitling practices.

Surname Viet Given Name Nam by Trinh T. Minh-ha

In Surname Viet Given Name Nam, the Vietnamese film director Trinh T. Minh-ha uses superimposed titles and subtitles extensively, graphically and critically. Subtitles consist of:

• The translation of the film’s dialogue and voice-over;
• Vietnamese poetry and proverbs displayed in the lower thirds of the screen.

What women say in Vietnamese or in heavily accented English is superimposed in different layouts, as blocks of English text on various regions of the film frame, including over the characters’ faces. Graphic titles, called by Trinh ‘visualized speech’, act as traditional subtitles by helping spectator comprehension.

She violates many of the norms of cinematic realism as a critic of those norms:

• In some sequences, she places the subject on the margin of the frame or decentres them by panning away from them.
• Close-up shots that would normally show the subjects’ full-face end up cutting off part of their faces.
• The film subverts the accepted practices of lip-synching and title synchronization.

Technology-driven changes

Technology-driven changes are increasing the need for subtitles and creating a demand for a new ‘efficient’ approach to subtitling. This expansion is motivated by some reasons:

• Media content can now be accessed via a growing range of digital distribution channels (video-sharing websites and on-demand internet streaming media platforms);
• Subtitling is now being used to mediate an expanding range of texts and genres, in addition to film and drama, subtitling is gaining popularity also in promotional corporate films, video games and documentaries.

These screen-based texts make a relatively formulaic or routinized use of language to automatize the production of subtitles, especially because we need to translate faster than before.

Example-Based Machine Translation (EMBT)

Nagao Makoto (1984), O’Hagan’s (2003) and Armstrong et al. (2006) have attempted to value the viability of Example-Based Machine Translator to the translation of DVD subtitles and bonus material for English-German and English-Japanese. EMBT system reuses examples of already existing translations, collected in the form of bilingual corpus (a collection of texts, either oral or written) with parallel texts (two texts produced in different languages), as a basis for the automated production of new translations. So, the machine works by analogy.

Example of bilingual corpus. The sentence can be divided into two parts: the first section is the same, while the second changes. The machine memorizes both them: this is the example that the translation can be carried out by analogy. People usually translate by decomposing a sentence, translating the different sections, and recomposing it: this is how the machine works.

In the machine there is no human intervention: this allows a very faster translation, but also a not-always perfect result.

More recently, Volk et al. (2010:53) presented a plausible rationale for the automation of subtitling in the Scandinavian context, where ‘large amounts of Tv subtitles are needed in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian’. This is because 90 percent of what Scandinavian people see on TV comes from the USA and other parts of the world. The work of Volk et al. evaluates the viability of automated subtitles are generated by a statistical machine-translation system from Swedish to Danish and Norwegian.

3D subtitling

According to Kozoulyaev (n.d.) ‘3D subtitling calls for tectonic changes in all aspects of production and post-production of stereographic films and TV programmes’, insofar as ‘it requires new plots, new shooting approaches, new conventions and new workflows that will profoundly change the industry’.

Conventions developed for the delivery of 2D subtitles are incompatible with the immersive viewing experience of 3D movies, for example, subtitles may collide with objects located within the three-dimensional diegetic space. An example of incompatible standard 2D subtitle for 3D movie can be seen watching a 3D movie without the necessary glasses: the subtitles will not divide into two parts as the scene does.

• In order to enhance the spectatorial experience and reduce eye strain, 3D titles should be dynamic, so able to follow the main point of interest as it moves around the scene.
• The depth position of 3D subtitles is important.
• The size of subtitles should be scaled and adjusted to the different positions that subtitles occupy within the three-dimensional space at each point of the scene.

As ‘3D subtitles interact with the film (and game) environment in a much stronger fashion than 2D subtitles and become elements of the action and shots themselves’, Kozoulyaev argues, 3D subtitling constitutes ‘a strong artistic undertaking’.

Revoicing

Revoicing

‘Revoicing’ is a generic term encompassing a range of spoken translation methods, including simultaneous interpreting, free commentary, narration, voice-over and lip-synchronized dubbing.

Simultaneous interpreting

Simultaneous interpreting is a live versioning method used to translate films or documentaries in settings where more elaborate forms of revoicing are not an option, typically due to time or funding constraints (e.g. film festivals). The interpreter, who may occasionally have to perform without accessing the relevant script, normally dubs the voices of the whole film cast.

Consecutive interpreting

In consecutive interpreting, the person on the screen speaks a language and then we have a consecutive interpretation. There is no written script, but it is different from simultaneous interpreting because there are no overlapping voices.

Free commentary

Free commentary is a revoicing technique performed on the spot by presenters or commentators broadcasting a high-profile event. It is clearly an adaptation of the original voice track content for a new audience, with additions, omissions, classifications, and comments’ (Gambier 2003). Delivered with a spontaneous tone, free commentary rarely aims to convey a faithful rendering of the original speech. The commentator is outside the diegetic world and usually adds information, giving something extra to the audience.

Narration

Narration is a live or pre-recorded form of oral transfer aiming ‘to provide a summarized but faithful and carefully scripted rendition of the original speech’. Normally its delivery is timed so that there is no clash with the visual syntax of the programme (Perez-Gonzalez 2009), as defined by the structural organization and the transitions between the constitutive units of the audiovisual texts.

The audience hears someone speaking who is neither a character nor part of the diegetic world. The narration is used when the director wants to preserve the crude language of the book (in case of films inspired by books).

Voice-over

In voiced-over or ‘half-dubbed’ material, the original and translated soundtracks co-exist and overlap. Typically, only the original voice is audible at the beginning. A few seconds into the programme, however, the volume of the source dialogue or narration is lowered, while the translated voice track becomes acoustically salient until the end.

Voice-over is conventionally used for the translation of televised interviews, documentaries, and other forms of audiovisual content where lip synchronization is not the essence.

The geographical dispersion of the voice-over practices has brought variation in the way in which this audiovisual transfer method is actually executed in each market. For example, in Poland, voice-over narrators or lektors provide a ‘whispering’ translation, thus allowing the audience to hear the original voices to the greatest extent possible. By contrast, in Iran, where voice-over was originally used to revoice both Iranian and foreign films, the narrator’s acting tends to be contagious and exuberant.

Fansubbing

Recent changes in the audiovisual landscape brought the development of digitization techniques and new models of distribution and consumption of audiovisual products, which have provided the spread of transformational practices.

Fansubbing is the subtitling of television drama and films by networked fan communities. It seeks to redress the shortage and cultural insensitivity of commercial translations. Fansubbers produce and distribute their own subtitled versions through Internet-based channels and, in so doing, provide their fellow fans with a more ‘authentic’ and meaningful spectatorial experience.

Sometimes, groups of politically engaged amateurs use subtitling to undermine the socio-economic structures that sustain global capitalism and/or to effect social and political change.

Anime fansubbing: Fansubbing in Italy

Assistive forms of AVT

Over the last two decades, audiovisual translation has contributed to enhancing the social integration of minorities all over the world.

• It helped immigrants to develop their skills in the language spoken by their host communities;
• With the emergence and consolidation of relatively new forms of intersemiotic assistive mediation, such as subtitling for the hard of hearing or audio description for the blind, it facilitates access to information and entertainment for sensory impaired members of the community.

Real-time subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing (respeaking)

Real-time subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing, often known as respeaking, is a technique in which a respeaker listens to the original sound of a live programme or event and respeaks it, including punctuation marks and some specific features for the deaf and hard of hearing audience, to a speech recognition software, which turns the recognized utterances into subtitles displayed on the screen with the shortest possible delay.

Subtitling for the hard of hearing and deaf provides a text display of the characters’ speech interspersed with written descriptions of sound features from the diegetic action that would not be otherwise accessible to Deaf viewers. This transfer of information from speech to written subtitles involves the deployment of dedicated mediation conventions in relation to the color, spotting, and position of subtitles.

Audio descriptions for the blind

Audio description for the blind is a spoken account of those visual aspects of a film that play a role in conveying its plot. The audio describers are engaged in a delicate balancing exercise to establish what the needs of the spectator may be, and to ensure the audience is not overburdened with excessive information.

Lip-synchronized dubbing

Once hailed as the supreme and most comprehensive form of translation (Cary 1969), lip-synchronized dubbing involves ‘the replacement of the original speech by a voice track which attempts to follow as closely as possible the timing, phrasing, and lip movement of the original dialogue (Luyken et al. 1991).

When it was first developed, the main priority for the film industry was to perfectly fit the actors’ lips, in what was to be known as voice ‘doubling’ and/or ‘ghosting’.

In 199a, the Indonesian government announced that foreign films on television should no longer be broadcast in their original language version with Indonesian summaries or subtitles...