Textprobe:
Kapitel Reboosting Screen Translation. A Prolegomenon:
Amplified by the Covid-19 pandemic that confined us to limited coordinates of social interaction and narrowed down spaces thought of as safe from the threat haunting the world within and without, the audiovisual medium became also a means of infusing a sense of normality (illusionary/elusive as it has so often proved) into our (dystopian) reality, alleviating loneliness and apprehensiveness. It comes as no surprise then that, besides the boosting interest of the media-oriented society in products provided by the audiovisual industry (AV content), there has been a growing demand for translators with competencies in translating and adapting audiovisual texts (subtitlers and dubbers).
In the introductory part of Fast-Forwarding with Audiovisual Translation published in 2017, Jorge Díaz Cintas and Kristijan Nikolic pinpoint the relegation of the more traditional, more conventional media (newspapers, journals, books), the very transition from "the paper page to the digital page" (1) and the "transformative impact" that the web and social media had on our way of interacting and communicating, "mainly due to the attractiveness of the audiovisual format in which audio and visuals come together in a symbiotic whole, thus enhancing the semiotic possibilities of the composite message and its potential to improve comprehension and retention" (1). Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have witnessed a new boom in this AV symbiotic whole and its societal ramifications, added to the already increased pace of the AV industry taking hold of the market, not necessarily in morphing into subsequent typology, but primarily in terms of amount and necessity, demand and supply. The streaming consumption skyrocketed in the many months of forced isolation and it is well-known and obvious to literate viewers/end users that this also impacted the quality of numerous translated/subtitled broadcasts - which reminds us of Jennifer Bisset's claim that (professional) subtitlers have become "a dying breed" and that "the art of subtitling is on the decline, all but doomed in an entertainment industry tempted by cheaper emerging artificial intelligence technologies", dismal pay, tight deadlines, "unrealistic" expectations, and "competition from clunky machine translation", an assertion that she supports with the example of Netflix's Squid Game series and the controversy on their quality-challenged English subtitles.
The shift to the online also triggered new dynamic approaches to technology and its potential to satisfy the consumers' needs and accessibility reflected in the AVT offer as well, but also with an increased awareness of the AV subtitlers, dubbers etc. to update practices and adapt to AVT state-of-the-art software and/or cloud-based systems in order to cater for the demands of the industry they work in and the audience they translate for.
The hasted stage of the ongoing (social) process of "audiovisualisation-cum-internetisation" (2) as Díaz Cintas and Nikolic call it, of transitioning from paper to screen, is understood in the present volume in terms of Translation Studies. Audiovisual Translation. Subtitling and Dubbing Animated Films into Romanian is a collection of researched contributions in applied audiovisual translation, focusing on the animated genre subtitled and dubbed into Romanian, comprising different approaches that provide a challenging framing of the process from both theoretical and practical points of view, a promising addition to the generous literature on screen translation. The theoretical frameworks are carefully documented and support applied research, relevant to the current developments in audiovisual modes on the Romanian market, yet with no claim to exhaust the perspectives they further. The studies showcased bring to the fore translation problems that the intercultural and interlinguistic process triggers, with our comment that they provide a small scale research and analysis to be improved in further studies.
The selected research studies (or analy
