Translation & Interpreting Workshop Series - Week 19 with Professor Frederic Chaume, Universitat Jaume I

In week 19, we are joined by Professor Frederic Chaume to deliver their workshop to our Translation and Interpreting students.

"A multimodal approach to film language and audiovisual translation: implications for practice and research"
Frederic Chaume

Following the initial publications on film semiotics —the line of research which considers film narrative as a type of organized language with its own structured grammar— any research study in audiovisual communication and/or audiovisual translation (AVT) has been based on the premise that audiovisual texts are multimodal texts that produce meaning through the interaction of sign systems transmitted via the acoustic and the visual channel (nowadays also via the tactile channel, as in the case of videogames). Despite the fact that Film Studies are way past such theories, these are still valid and very useful in the analysis of the audiovisual text from a Translation Studies perspective.

In order to deconstruct the audiovisual text from a filmic viewpoint, while understanding the impact of signifying codes in AVT, this talk attempts to answer the following questions: what does a translator need to know about film narrative?, which filmic components have an influence on the translation?, what is filmic competence? And, most important of all, how can knowledge in film and television be applied to the task of translating for dubbing, interlingual subtitling, subtitling for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (SDH) or audio-description for the visually impaired (AD)?