Pragmatics-Driven Techniques of Audiovisual Media Translation

Abstract

The article focuses on some issues of audiovisual translation, executed in voiceover mode within the scope of audiovisual media. Audiovisual translation is regarded as an interlingual transfer of the verbal component of layered multimodal texts that is characterized by a range of constraints that allow little latitude in the translator’s choice of pertinent translation strategies, procedures and techniques. The most significant to be mentioned are the time constraints, the requirements for synchronizing the sounding of the translated voice-over with the shots and frames of the video sequence, as well as the psychophysiological parameters of the perception of the translated content by ear. In this regard, it seems obvious that the traditional concepts of translation equivalence, which were posited on the basis of written, mainly literary, translations analysis, do not always turn out to be relevant as far as revoicing in media workflow is concerned, and therefore require to be revisited in the light of the communicative-functional approach. However, Comparative Stylistics and linguistics-oriented Translation Studies, contributed largely to building up an extensive taxonomy of translation operations, which have significant descriptive potential. For this reason, the present article uses the typological arsenal of translation techniques depicted by the seminal works which developed within the framework of transformation-centered approach (transposition, equivalence, modulation and adaptation). Nevertheless, the study focuses on the translation techniques the usage of which is motivated not by structural language asymmetry, but rather by discrepancies in the cultural and cognitive repertoire of the source and target languages speakers, as well as by specific conditions of multichannel perception of audiovisual media texts.

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