Successful consumer technology innovations almost always make their way into the corporate world before long. Smartphones, cloud apps and video calls quickly made the jump from consumer to professional life. Once people discover a better user experience and quality is possible, they will demand that work tools meet the same standards as those they use in their personal lives. It is what already happened with our own products. Individuals adopted DeepL Translator on their own devices for speed and quality, then organisations standardised it……..Continue reading…
By Stefan Mesken
Source: The AI Journal
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Critics:
Audiovisual translation studies (AVT) is concerned with translation that takes place in audio and/or visual settings, such as the cinema, television, video games and also some live events such as opera performances. The common denominator for studies in this field is that translation is carried out on multiple semiotic systems.
As the translated texts (so-called polysemiotic texts)have messages that are conveyed through more than one semiotic channel, i.e. not just through the written or spoken word, but also via sound and/or images. The main translation modes under study are subtitling, film dubbing and voice-over, but also surtitling for the opera and theatre.
Media accessibility studies is often considered a part of this field as well, with audio description for the blind and partially sighted and subtitles for the deaf or hard-of-hearing being the main objects of study. The various conditions and constraints imposed by the different media forms and translation modes, which influence how translation is carried out, are often at the heart of most studies of the product or process of AVT.
Many researchers in the field of AVT Studies are organized in the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation, as are many practitioners in the field. Non-professional translation refers to the translation activities performed by translators who are not working professionally, usually in ways made possible by the Internet. These practices have mushroomed with the recent democratization of technology and the popularization of the Internet.
Volunteer translation initiatives have emerged all around the world, and deal with the translations of various types of written and multimedia products. Normally, it is not required for volunteers to have been trained in translation, but trained translators could also participate, such as the case of Translators without Borders. Depending on the feature that each scholar considers the most important, different terms have been used to label “non-professional translation”.
O’Hagan has used “user-generated translation”, “fan translation” and “community translation”. Fernández-Costales and Jiménez-Crespo prefer “collaborative translation”, while Pérez-González labels it “amateur subtitling”. Pym proposes that the fundamental difference between this type of translation and professional translation relies on monetary reward, and he suggests it should be called “volunteer translation”.
Some of the most popular fan-controlled non-professional translation practices are fansubbing, fandubbing, ROM hacking or fan translation of video games, and scanlation. These practices are mostly supported by a strong and consolidated fan base, although larger non-professional translation projects normally apply crowdsourcing models and are controlled by companies or organizations.
Since 2008, Facebook has used crowdsourcing to have its website translated by its users and TED conference has set up the open translation project TED Translators in which volunteers use the Amara platform to create subtitles online for TED talks. The growing variety of paradigms is mentioned as one of the possible sources of conflict in the discipline.
As early as 1999, the conceptual gap between non-essentialist and empirical approaches came up for debate at the Vic Forum on Training Translators and Interpreters: New Directions for the Millennium. The discussants, Rosemary Arrojo and Andrew Chesterman, explicitly sought common shared ground for both approaches.
Interdisciplinarity has made the creation of new paradigms possible, as most of the developed theories grew from contact with other disciplines like linguistics, comparative literature, cultural studies, philosophy, sociology or historiography. At the same time, it might have provoked the fragmentation of translation studies as a discipline on its own right.
A second source of conflict rises from the breach between theory and practice. As the prescriptivism of the earlier studies gives room to descriptivism and theorization, professionals see less applicability of the studies. At the same time, university research assessment places little if any importance on translation practice. Translation studies has shown a tendency to broaden its fields of inquiry, and this trend may be expected to continue.
This particularly concerns extensions into adaptation studies, intralingual translation, translation between semiotic systems (image to text to music, for example), and translation as the form of all interpretation and thus of all understanding, as suggested in Roman Jakobson’s work, On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.
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