Approaching the audio description of humour

Este artículo tiene como propósito principal ofrecer una introducción a la audiodescripción (AD) y realizar una aproximación a la cuestión de la AD, a la vez que se comenta brevemente la situación actual de esta práctica y se mencionan algunos de los trabajos más representativos de este campo. A continuación se presenta un estudio de caso cuyo principal objetivo consistió en analizar (desde una perspectiva descriptiva y centrando la atención en los chistes visuales) la AD de la comedia británica I want Candy (se muestran varios ejemplos con objeto de ilustar cómo se manejó el humor). Algunos de los resultados obtenidos son: 1) si bien se detectaron ciertos momentos puntuales y marginales en los que la descripción se superpuso al diálogo, en términos generales se respetó la regla de usar los espacios o silencios entre diálogos para incluir la descripción (lo que en ocasiones supuso la pérdida de elementos potencialmente humorísticos) y 2) casi dos quintas partes de los fragmentos visuales potencialmente humorísticos no se describieron, probablemente debido a las restricciones temporales. Por último se proponen algunas ideas de investigación futura.G.I. HUM 767 (ayudas a Grupos de Investigación de la Junta de Andalucía) / Editorial Comares (colección interlingua

Making the Standard of Audiovisual Text for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired

The development of television and film industry in a global context requires film and television industry to be able to present the shows that can be enjoyed by the general public without any restrictions. This phenomenon essentially underlies the emergence of community needs for audiovisual translation (layman terms: the subtitle). The industrialized world utilize audioviual translation in order to visualize verbal messages in other languages so that it can be understood. However, any progress in the field of audiovisual is not coupled with accessibility for all individuals. Providers of text or audio in existing programs, so far, have not fully considered deaf people or those with hearing impaired (deaf or hearing impaired/DH). In line with that, a set of standard is required to meet the needs of the DH. Referring to the high demand for audiovisual translation and the view on the audiovisual translation which has not yet met the needs of the DH, This research is fundamentally directed to create audiovisual translation standards which is appropriate for all audiences specifically for the DH. This study is a qualitative study using library research approach. Therefore, the analysis is directed at the analysis of the current product and its shortcomings. To be able to meet the demand for audiovisual translation standards, researchers will undertake a number of steps that includes product analysis research and product development. This study is expected to be the basis for making an audiovisual translation quality products which can be enjoyed by all audiences.Keywords: Audiovisual translation, deaf or hearing impaired, research and development

Is audiovisual translation putting the concept of translation up against the ropes?

The imposing reality of audiovisual translation has long challenged the concept of ‘equivalence’ and has put this notion against the ropes almost from the very first moments of its creation. Furthermore, the advent of new tendencies in audiovisual consumption, accompanied by a variety of localization practices, challenges the traditional concept of ‘translation’ as we know it. This article reviews which characteristics of audiovisual translation have called into question the very essence of translation, as it has been traditionally understood. After an explanation of new practices mainly created by the new audiences or prosumers, a list of concepts and terms that try to give account to this new reality is discussed, among them localisation, transadaptation, adaptation, transcreation and transmedia narratives, as well as remakes and format licensing. Conclusions call for a new concept of equivalence that also embraces new types of relations between original and target texts, such as iconic and narrative equivalence

Sign Languages, Translation, and Interpreting: Creative Practices in Audiovisual Content

This article explores current creative practices involving the representation of sign languages, sign language interpreting, sign language translation (Napier and Leeson 2016; HBB4ALL 2017; CNLSE 2017; Tamayo 2022), and sign language live translation (Tamayo 2022) in audiovisual content. To that end, a review of the concept creative sign language and a review of previous publications on the matter will be provided. Subsequently, the implementation of creativity at different production stages, and the use of different resources when sign languages are present in audiovisual content, will be discussed by analyzing some selected innovative examples (mostly of practices in Spain). Finally, a taxonomy that takes into account not only internal creativity (that is inherent to sign languages), but also collaborative and external creativity. Conclusions will focus on how creative practices can expand our understanding of different art expressions, human communication, and inclusion, and can help establish new and meaningful connections among them.This work is part of the consolidated research group TRALIMA/ITZULIK (IT1209–19), recognized as such by the Basque Government as well as the ALMA research network (RED 2018–102475-T) recognized by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities of Spain. This work is also part of The Quality of Live Subtitling (QuaLiSub), a regional, national, and international study funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (ref. PID2020–117738RB-I00)

Line breaks in subtitling: An eye tracking study on viewer preferences

There is a discrepancy between professional subtitling guidelines and how they are implemented in real life. One example of such discrepancy are line breaks: the way the text is divided between the two lines in a subtitle. Although we know from the guidelines how subtitles should look like and from watching subtitled materials how they really look like, little is known about what line breaks viewers would prefer. We examined individual differences in syntactic processing and viewers’ preferences regarding line breaks in various linguistic units, including noun, verb and adjective phrases. We studied people’s eye movements while they were reading pictures with subtitles. We also investigated whether these preferences are affected by hearing status and previous experience with subtitling. Viewers were shown 30 pairs of screenshots with syntactically segmented and non-syntactically segmented subtitles and they were asked to choose which subtitle in each pair was better. We tested 21 English, 26 Spanish and 21 Polish hearing people, and 19 hard of hearing and deaf people from the UK. Our results show that viewers prefer syntactically segmented line breaks. Eye tracking results indicate that linguistic units are processed differently depending on the linguistic category and the viewers’ profile

Subtitling for the Deaf and the Hard-of-hearing: A Reception Study in the Turkish Context

This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of subtitling for people with hearing impairments and to improve the accessibility to audiovisual material for hearing-impaired viewers in Turkey. It starts by providing a detailed general overview of the current state of accessibility and includes a detailed discussion on existing legislation, an outline of the limited practice of subtitling for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing (SDH) in Turkish and a profile of the assumed target audience. The ultimate goal of this research is to create a set of guidelines that can be used in the production of quality SDH in Turkey. In order to achieve these aims, the study adopts a product-oriented descriptive approach and first investigates the guidelines applied in countries where SDH has long been established as a professional practice in an attempt to reveal some of the shared values of good practice as well as potential divergences. Following this descriptive analysis, some of the key contradicting practices in the guidelines – speaker identification, reading speed, indication of sound and paralinguistic information – are tested on an audience of (37) Turkish hearing-impaired viewers so as to unveil their needs and preferences within the framework of Audience Reception Theory. Quantitative data on the preferences of Turkish viewers was collected by means of questionnaires filled in by the participants after they had watched different sets of subtitles, each of them testing a different feature. Further qualitative data was obtained through interviews conducted with four participants who took part in the experiment so as to generate more in-depth information regarding their preferences. The results yielded by the statistical analysis of the quantitative data and the interpretive phenomenological analysis of the qualitative data culminated in the drafting of a set of guidelines that can be used in the production of SDH in Turkey

Audiovisual content analysis in the translation process

The article presents a comprehensive approach to the process of audiovisual translation that includes application of multimodal analysis of semiotic codes present in audiovisual productions. The article dwells on how the proposed approach can be applied to analyzing audiovisual productions for different types of audiovisual translation. Due to its multimodal nature, an audiovisual production is understood by the authors as an audiovisual text that combines image, sound and verbal means, that is, different modes conveying meaning. The means of conveying meaning in an audiovisual production include the visual non-verbal elements, visual verbal elements as well as audio non-verbal and verbal elements. The priority of these means of meaning transfer and their interaction in meaning generation differ significantly depending on the genre of audiovisual productions and the specifics of the process of its creation

Rendering multilingualism through audio subtitles : shaping a categorisation for aural strategies

Multilingualism in films has increased in recent productions as a reflection of today's globalised word. Different translation transfer modes such as dubbing or subtitling are combined to maintain the film's multilingual essence when translated into other languages. Within media accessibility, audio subtitles, an aurally-rendered version of written subtitles, is used to make access possible for audiences with vision or reading difficulties. By taking Sternberg's representation of polylingualism (1981. Polylingualism as reality and translation as mimesis. Poetics Today, 2(4), 221-239), this article offers a categorisation of the strategies that may be used to reveal multilingualism in audiovisual content through audio subtitles similar to the way Szarkowska, Zbikowska, & Krejtz (2013. Subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing in multilingual films. International Journal of Multilingualism, 10(3), 292-312) did with subtitles for the deaf and the hard of hearing. By taking a descriptive approach, two main strategies or effects for the delivery of audio subtitles - dubbing and voice-over - are highlighted and explained. By combining these two effects with the information provided by the audio description, the levels of the categorisation are defined from more to less multilingualism-revealing: vehicular matching, selective reproduction, verbal transposition, explicit attribution and homogenising convention