The emerging discipline of audiovisual translation (AVT) studies is clearly forward-looking. Its methodology is progressively experimental, including electroencephalography and psychophysiological measures (Orero et al. 2018), which not long ago were the preserve of medical studies. It embraces advances in audiovisual translation practice, such as interlingual live subtitling with respeaking (Romero-Fresco and Pöchhacker 2017), as well as changing audience expectations. It escaped the confines of linguistics long ago and seems to have an increasingly loose relationship with translation studies, inevitably veering in the direction of media accessibility (Bogucki 2019). The headway of AVT studies is thus such that not many disciplines within the new humanities (or ‘numanities’) can keep pace. However, at the core of audiovisual translation studies is research into film translation, chiefly subtitling and dubbing. Though somewhat neglected of late, studies of technical constraints, techniques, and untranslatability in preparing different language versions of movies continue to be the cornerstone of AVT. The Translation of Films 1900–1950 fills a glaring gap by boldly going where precious few AVT researchers have gone before – the beginning of the film industry.

References

Bogucki, Łukasz

2019 Areas and Methods of Audiovisual Translation Research. 3rd revised ed. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Orero, Pilar, Stephen Doherty, Jan-Louis Kruger, Anna Matamala, Jan Pedersen, Elisa Perego, Pablo Romero-Fresco, Sara Rovira-Esteva, Olga Soler-Vilageliu, and Agnieszka Szarkowska

2018 “Conducting Experimental Research in Audiovisual Translation (AVT): A Position Paper.” The Journal of Specialised Translation 30: 105–126.

O’Sullivan, Carol, and Jean-François Cornu

2018 “History of Audiovisual Translation.” In The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation, edited by Luis Perez-Gonzalez, 15–30. New York: Routledge.

Perego, Elisa, and Ambra Pacinotti

In press. “Audiovisual Translation through the Ages.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility edited by Łukasz Bogucki and Mikołaj Deckert London Palgrave

Romero-Fresco, Pablo, and Franz Pöchhacker

2017 “Quality Assessment in Interlingual Live Subtitling: The NTR Model.” Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series: Themes in Translation Studies 16: 149–167.