Cover not available
Article published In:
Challenges and solutions in translation: Insights into training, ELF, and accessibility
Guest-edited by Rossella Latorraca and Jacqueline Aiello
[Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 9:1] 2023
► pp. 22–40

Audiovisual mediation through English intralingual and interlingual subtitling

 | University of Salento
This paper reports on a case study implemented at the University of Salento and, partially, at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, concerning the use of subtitles as a didactic tool to develop intercultural communication skills. This study examines the intralingual and interlingual translations of the reportage Fortress Italia: Capsized in Lampedusa, about migrant arrivals in Italy and Europe. Although the video is of interest to international viewers, the lack of proper subtitling may undermine its accessibility to non-native English speakers. On the one hand, subtitles do not appear when Standard English is used, so the comprehension of those utterances depends on the receivers’ listening skills; on the other hand, the official retextualizations are characterized by formal register and editorial additions that may affect their readability. For these reasons, an alternative rendering was commissioned to a number of undergraduate and postgraduate students of Translation and Interpreting, in order to enquire into new areas of adoption of English as an International Language and as a Lingua Franca. The analysis of the selected corpus of extracts will pinpoint the strategies of lexical and structural simplification and condensation, along with the selection of specific verb tenses and aspects, which are expected to enhance the envisaged recipients’ understanding of the video’s message. Since these features of English are actively selected, by the subjects that were involved in this research, so as to foster cross-cultural communication between the authors and viewers of the news report, this study contends that specific lingua-franca uses can be activated when subtitling multimodal texts. Hence, the notion of ‘audiovisual mediation’ will be introduced in order to label an approach to audiovisual translation aiming to: (i) make the illocutionary force accessible and acceptable to the envisaged, international audience; and (ii) overcome the conventional associations between dubbing and domestication, and subtitling and foreignization.
Keywords: English as a Lingua Franca, audiovisual translation, audiovisual mediation, subtitling, intralinguistic and interlinguistic translation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction, research hypothesis and rationale
  • 2.From Audiovisual Translation to Audiovisual Mediation
  • 3.Research method and objectives
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Translation of non-native English speakers’ utterances
    • 4.2Analysis and translation of Italian speakers’ utterances
  • 5.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 17 March 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ttmc.00100.iai
References (40)
References
Biran, Or, Samuel Brody, and Noémie Elhadad. 2011. “Putting It Simply: A Context-aware Approach to Lexical Simplification.” In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, 496–501. Portland: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Bruno, Marco. 2016. “Media Representations of Immigrants in Italy: Framing Real and Symbolic Borders.” REMHU 461: 45–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Caimi, Annamaria. 2006. “Audiovisual Translation and Language Learning: The Promotion of Intralingual Subtitles.” The Journal of Specialised Translation 61: 85–98.Google Scholar
Campbell, Stuart. 2005. “English Translation and Linguistic Hegemony in the Global Era.” In In and Out of English: For Better, for Worse?, ed. by Gunilla Anderman, and Margaret Rogers, 27–38. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carrell, Patricia L. 1983. “Some Issues in the Role of Schemata, or Background Knowledge, in Second Language Comprehension.” Reading in a Foreign Language 1 (2): 81–92.Google Scholar
Cenoz, Jasone. 2019. “Translanguaging Pedagogies and English as a Lingua Franca.” Language Teaching 52 (1): 71–85. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cogo, Alessia, and Martin Dewey. 2006. “Efficiency in ELF Communication: From Pragmatic Motives to Lexico-grammatical Innovation.” Nordic Journal of English Studies 5 (2): 59–93. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Daelemans, Walter, Anja Höthker, and Erik Tjong Kim Sang. 2004. “Automatic Sentence Simplification for Subtitling in Dutch and English.” In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’04), 1045–1048. Lisbon: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).Google Scholar
Denton, John, and Debora Ciampi. 2012. “A New Development in Audiovisual Translation Studies: Focus on Target Audience Perception.” LEA – Lingue e letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente 1 (1): 399–422.Google Scholar
Di Giovanni, Elena, Pilar Orero, and Rosa Agost. 2012. “Multidisciplinarity in Audiovisual Translation.” MonTI 41: 9–22. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hynninen, Niina. 2019. “Fluency in English as a Lingua Franca Interaction.” In Fluency in L2 Learning and Use, ed. by Pekka Lintunen, Maarit Mutta, and Pauliina Peltonen, 81–95. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Iaia, Pietro L. 2015. “Sottotitolazione intralinguistica e inglese lingua franca. Strategie di mediazione audiovisiva.” Lingue e Linguaggi 161: 215–236. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, Jennifer. 2014. English as a Lingua Franca in the International University: The Politics of Academic English Language Policy. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
. 2015. “Repositioning English and Multilingualism in English as a Lingua Franca.” Englishes in Practice 2 (3): 49–85. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kaur, Jagdish. 2009. English as a Lingua Franca: Co-constructing Understanding. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag.Google Scholar
. 2016. “Intercultural Misunderstanding Revisited: Cultural Difference as a (non) Source of Misunderstanding in ELF Communication.” In The Cultural and Intercultural Dimensions of English as a Lingua Franca, ed. by Prue Holmes, and Fred Dervin, 134–156. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar. A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lefevere, André. 1992. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
MacKenzie, Ian. 2013. “Lexical Inventiveness and Conventionality in English as a Lingua Franca and English Translation.” The European English Messenger 22 (1): 47–53.Google Scholar
Massidda, Serenella. 2015. Audiovisual Translation in the Digital Age: The Italian Fansubbing Phenomenon. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mauranen, Anna. 2007. “Hybrid Voices: English as the Lingua Franca of Academics.” In Language and Discipline Perspectives on Academic Discourse, ed. by Kjersti Fløttum, 243–259. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
McArthur, Tom. 2001. “World English and World Englishes: Trends, Tensions, Varieties and Standards.” Language Teaching 34 (1): 1–20. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, Cameron, Michael D. Giardina, Susan J. Harewood, and Jin-K. Park. 2003. “Contesting Culture, Identity and Curriculum Dilemmas in the Age of Globalization, Postcolonialism, and Multiplicity.” Harvard Educational Review 73 (3): 449–465. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mossop, Brian. 2001. Revising and Editing for Translators. London: St. Jerome Publishing.Google Scholar
Munday, Jeremy. 2000. “Technology at the Service of the Translator? A Response to Mary Snell-Hornby.” In Translation in the Global Village, ed. by Christina Schaffner, 57–59. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Paetzold, Gustavo H., and Lucia Specia. 2016. “Unsupervised Lexical Simplification for Non-native Speakers.” In AAAI’16: Proceedings of the Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 3761–3767. Phoenix: AAAI Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Paolinelli, Mario, and Eleonora Di Fortunato. 2005. Tradurre per il doppiaggio. La trasposizione linguistica dell’audiovisivo: teoria e pratica di un’arte imperfetta. Milan: Hoepli.Google Scholar
Rosnow, Ralph L. 1990. “Teaching Research Ethics through Role Play and Discussion.” Teaching of Psychology 17 (3): 179–181. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rudby, Rani, and Mario Saraceni. 2006. “An Interview with Suresh Canagarajah.” In English in the World. Global Rules, Global Roles, ed. by Rani Rudby, and Mario Saraceni, 200–211. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Sager, Juan. 1994. Language Engineering and Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sánchez-Requena, Alicia. 2016. “Audiovisual Translation in Teaching Foreign Languages: Contributions of Dubbing to Develop Fluency and Pronunciation in Spontaneous Conversations.” Porta Linguarum 261: 9–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seidlhofer, Barbara. 1995. Approaches to Summarization: Discourse Analysis and Language Education. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.Google Scholar
. 2011. Understanding English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Swales, John. 1990. Genre Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Taviano, Stefania. 2010. Translating English as a Lingua Franca. Florence: Le Monnier Università.Google Scholar
Ulrych, Margherita. 2014. Traces of Mediation in Rewriting and Translation. Milan: EDUCatt.Google Scholar
Urban, Greg. 1996. “Entextualization, Replication and Power.” In Natural Histories of Discourse, ed. by Michael Silverstein, and Greg Urban, 21–44. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Widdowson, Henry G. 1991. “The Description and Prescription of Language.” In Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics. Linguistics and Language Pedagogy: The State of the Art, ed. by James E. Alatis, 11–24. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Yardley-Matwiejczuk, Krysia M. 1997. Role Play: Theory and Practice. London: SAGE Publications.Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Marino-Jiménez, Mauro, Carlos Torres-Ravello & Lizlaleyne Ramírez-Rodríguez
2024. Identity of a vulnerable audience in their higher education center: the case of scholarship holders in Peru. Cogent Education 11:1 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.