Special Issue on “Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility in the Age of Streaming Platforms”

2023-05-16

Special Issue on “Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility in the Age of Streaming Platforms”

Guest editors: Sofía Sánchez-Mompeán, University of Murcia, Spain; Serenella Zanotti, Università Roma Tre, Italy

 

Streaming platforms have marked a watershed in today’s film industry, revolutionising mainstream TV distribution systems and reshaping viewers’ consumption habits (Jenner, 2018; Pedersen, 2018). Users are now holding the reins of their own entertainment experience and enjoy relatively more freedom in deciding when, where and how to view media products. The way in which this new reality is impacting audiovisual translation (AVT) and media accessibility (MA) with respect to producers, practitioners, audiences and workflows is worth bringing into focus.  

The global success of subscription-based services—such as Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Hulu and Disney+—has brought with it a growing demand for localised content, substantially increasing the availability of audiovisual products translated into multiple languages through captioning and revoicing techniques (Chaume, 2019). According to Los Angeles Times, in 2021 Netflix released 5 million minutes of dubbed programming and subtitled 7 million minutes (Lee, 2022). Localisation has thus become a game changer for streaming companies wishing to attract a wider audience and to lead an international market that is no longer dominated by English-language originals (Hayes, 2021). As a matter of fact, many of the latest most-watched on-demand series are non-English shows from South Korea (Squid Game), France (Lupin) or Spain (La Casa de Papel), to name but a few. This new AVT landscape has exerted a dramatic impact on localisation demands and trends such as the rise in the consumption of dubbed material in English-speaking markets (Chaume, 2018; Ranzato & Zanotti, 2019; Hayes, 2021; Sánchez-Mompeán, 2021; Spiteri Miggiani, 2021) or the faster speed at which fan-based translations are being generated to anticipate professionally released versions (Díaz-Cintas, 2018; Dwyer, 2021).

The surge in the popularity of AVT and MA practices has favoured the expansion of non-local productions beyond their language barriers, but it has also left translated content increasingly prone to comparisons and criticism due to the relative easiness of access to the different localised versions. Although negative comments are not always justified, especially when disregarding the nature of translation and the constraints attached to it (Orrego-Carmona, 2021), some have served to fight for higher quality levels, up-to-date conventions and better working conditions (Spiteri Miggiani, 2021, 2022), thus turning AVT and MA into hot topics of discussion nowadays.

Notwithstanding that the work of translators seems to be gradually raising its visibility in society, the challenges faced by practitioners as well as the dominant trends in the production and consumption of localised content for over-the-top platforms and the current technological developments such as cloud-based localisation services (Bolaños-García-Escribano & Díaz-Cintas, 2020; Chaume & de los Reyes Lozano, 2021; Georgakopoulou, 2021) are still unexplored from the point of view of academic research and practice.

We are interested in both theoretical and practical approaches that focus on AVT and MA in the current streaming era. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Dubbing research and practice
  • Voiceover research and practice
  • Subtitling research and practice
  • Subtitling for the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH) research and practice
  • Audiodescription (AD) research and practice
  • Fan-based translations (e.g., fansubbing, fandubbing, parodic dubbing…)
  • Reception and perception studies (e.g., audience profile, challenges…)
  • New consumption habits (e.g., binge-watching, virtual communities…)
  • Quality parameters and conventions (e.g., use of automatic translation, use of a pivot language…)
  • Creative practices in AVT and MA
  • Cloud-based platforms and workflows and technological trends
  • Production and distribution tools in AVT and MA
  • Training, pedagogical approaches and new professional profiles

 

Key dates

1 September 2023: abstract submission to the guest editors (250 words; references not included in wordcount). Please email your abstract to both guest editors: sofia.sanchez@um.es and serenella.zanotti@uniroma3.it.

30 September 2023: notification of abstract acceptance.

31 March 2024: submission of full papers via the journal website. Stylesheet: https://www.trans-int.org/index.php/transint/about/submissions#authorGuidelines.

April-October 2024: peer-review and revision period.

1 January 2025: deadline for submission of revised versions.

July 2025: publication of special issue.

 

Guest editors

Sofía Sánchez-Mompeán is a senior lecturer at the Department of Translation and Interpreting, University of Murcia (Spain). She holds a PhD and MA in Audiovisual Translation (University of Roehampton) and a BA in Translation and Interpreting (University of Murcia). She has been awarded several recognitions such as the Gerhard Weiler Prize and the Martha Cheung Award for her research on audiovisual translation. She is the author of The Prosody of Dubbed Speech: Beyond the Character’s Words (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and has published several papers in a number of renowned journals. She is a member of the research groups GALMA (Galician Observatory for Media Accessibility) and TECTRAD (Technology and Translation). Her main research interests include the dubbing-prosody interface, creative practices in dubbing, and audiovisual translation in the age of streaming platforms.

Serenella Zanotti is Associate Professor of English and Translation Studies at the University of Rome III, Italy. Her main research interests are in the area of Translation Studies, with a focus on film translation history and translation archives. She has published extensively on topics ranging from audiovisual translation to cross-cultural pragmatics, translingualism and feminist translation theories. Her most recent work centres on Stanley Kubrick. Other recent projects deal with film translation in the silent era and collaborative self-translation. Among her publications are two monographs on James Joyce and numerous edited volumes, most recently Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation (Routledge, 2018), Reassessing Dubbing: Historical Approaches and Current Trends (Benjamins, 2019) and English in Audiovisual Translation Research: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives (Textus, 2021). 

 

REFERENCES:

Bolaños-García-Escribano, A. & Díaz-Cintas, J. (2020). The cloud turn in audiovisual translation. In L. Bogucki & M. Deckert (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility (pp. 519-544). Palgrave Macmillan.

Chaume, F. (2018). Is audiovisual translation putting the concept of translation up against the ropes? The Journal of Specialised Translation, 30, 84-104.

Chaume, F. (2019). Audiovisual translation in the age of digital transformation. Industrial and social implications. In I. Ranzato and S. Zanotti (Eds.), Reassessing Dubbing. Historical approaches and current trends (pp. 103-124). John Benjamins.

Chaume, F. & de los Reyes Lozano, J. (2021). El doblaje en la nube: La última revolución en la localización de contenidos audiovisuales. In B. Reverter Oliver, J. J. Martínez Sierra, D. González Pastor & J. F. Carrero Martín (Eds.), Modalidades de traducción audiovisual: Completando el espectro (pp. 1-16). Comares.

Díaz-Cintas, J. (2018). ‘Subtitling’s a carnival’: New practices in cyberspace. The Journal of Specialised Translation, 30, 127-149.

Dwyer, T. (2021). Audiovisual translation and fandom. In L. Pérez-González (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation (pp. 436-452). Routledge.

Georgakopoulou, P. (2021). Technologization of audiovisual translation. In L. Pérez-González (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation (pp. 516-539). Routledge.

Hayes, L. (2021). Netflix disrupting dubbing: English dubs and British accents. Journal of Audiovisual Translation, 4(1), 1-26.

Jenner, M. (2019). Netflix and the re-invention of television. Palgrave Macmillan.

Lee, W. (2022). Why dubbing has become more crucial to Netflix’s business. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2022-02-28/why-dubbing-has-become-more-crucial-to-netflixs-business

Orrego-Carmona, D. (2021). Squid Game: Why you shouldn’t be so harsh on translators? The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/squid-game-why-you-shouldnt-be-too-hard-on-translators-169968?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1634315784

Pedersen, J. (2018). From old tricks to Netflix: How local are interlingual subtitling norms for streamed television? Journal of Audiovisual Translation, 1(1), 81-100.

Ranzato, I. & Zanotti, S. (2019). The dubbing revolution. In I. Ranzato & S. Zanotti (Eds.), Reassessing dubbing. Historical approaches and current trends (pp. 1-14). John Benjamins.

Sánchez-Mompeán, S. (2021). Netflix likes it dubbed: Taking on the challenge of dubbing into English. Language & Communication, 80, 180-190.

Spiteri Miggiani, G. (2022). Measuring quality in translation for dubbing: a quality assessment model proposal for trainers and stakeholders. XLinguae, 15(2), 85-102.

Spiteri Miggiani, G. (2021). English-language dubbing: Challenges and quality standards of an emerging localisation trend. The Journal of Specialised Translation, 36, 2-25.