Chapter 28 | Audiovisual Translation and Activism

 

Back to Publications   Back to The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation

 

 

 

Publication date: 13 September 2018
Copyright date 2019
Hardback ISBN: 9781138859524
E-book ISBN 9781315717166
You can order this volume on the Routledge website

 

 

 

 

 

Recent technological advances and the increasingly global outlook of many activist movements today have placed audiovisual translation at the centre of various initiatives that seek to challenge the corporate and political order. This chapter outlines a number of methodological challenges that complicate the study of activist audiovisual translation and calls for a rethinking of research priorities and theoretical assumptions in this area of scholarship. The discussion focuses on political rather than aesthetic activism, and on subtitling as the most common mode of circulating activist audiovisual products on a global level. Issues discussed include the visibility and agency of subtiters in political movements, activist textual strategies, abusive subtitling, prefiguration, the impact of technology, and the tension between politics and logistics. The arguments are largely supported by examples from a study of subtitling during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, including material drawn from unpublished interviews conducted by the author.

 

 

Mona Baker is Professor Emerita of Translation Studies at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester, author of Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account (Routledge 2006), editor of Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution (Routledge 2016) and co-editor of the series Critical Perspectives on Citizen Media (Routledge).

 

 

The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation Studies provides an authoritative and straightforward overview of the field through thirty-two specially commissioned chapters written by leading scholars in the field.

This state-of-the-art reference work is divided in four sections. The first part focuses on established and emerging audiovisual translation modalities, explores the changing contexts in which they have been and continue to be used, and examine how cultural and technological changes are directing their future trajectories. The second part explores the interface between audiovisual translation and a range of theoretical models that have proved particularly productive in steering research in audiovisual translation studies. Some of these models are associated with disciplines that have long intersected with audiovisual translation, while others are drawn from areas of knowledge that are only now beginning to make their presence felt in the audiovisual translation literature. The third part surveys a range of methodological approaches supporting traditional and innovative ways of interrogating audiovisual translation data. The final part addresses a range of themes pertaining to the place of audiovisual translation in society: these include the institutionalization, academization and technologization of audiovisual translation, as well as its role as a force for social change, both within and outside the industry. This Handbook gives audiovisual translation studies the voice it needs to make its presence felt within the Humanities research landscape.

 

Back to Publications   Back to The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation