The Symbiotic Match of AVT & Tech Industry State-Of-The-Art and Way Forward

The Audiovisual Translation (AVT) sector and the Tech industry have been inseparable, a symbiotic match. In the AVT field, the introduction of the DVD in 1995 was the most significant development in the field of AVT, profoundly influencing the nature of professional practices. It had «repercussions not only in the way audiovisual programmes started to be packaged, marketed and consumed, but also from a quantitative perspective» (Díaz-Cintas 2013: 119). Yet, the greatest catalyst of changes in communications and AVT has always been the Internet (Díaz-Cintas 2013: 119). In the last decade, the world around us has radically altered. On a daily basis, we are immersed in an audiovisual reality, surrounded by Video Streaming on Demand (SVoD) systems, where players like Netflix spend billions of dollars in new productions reaching volumes of content that were impossible only a decade ago. New experiments with advanced technologies applied to AVT have been consistently carried out since 2000 to meet the demands of SVoD systems: automatic speech recognition (ASR) able to ‘understand’ the voices in a dialogue, and neural machine translation (NMT) processes have been applied to the production of subtitled versions of films and TV shows to a large extent, generating new roles in the industry and creating new debates about the ethics of technology in the AVT industry

The Italian fansubbing phenomenon

The purpose of this study is to investigate the Italian fansubbing phenomenon through an analysis of the beliefs and practices of two online communities: ItaSA and Subsfactory. The present study builds upon prior research related to amateur translation conducted by Bogucki, and found in Díaz-Cintas and Anderman (2009). In the concluding remarks of his paper, “Amateur Subtitling on the Internet”, the author states the lack of feasibility of investigating the work of fansubbers, since the unpredictability of their work and their linguistic incompetence deprive their translations of any potential credibility. He argues, however, that if amateur subtitling were to become near-professional, fansubbed versions should be subjected to a translation quality assessment and, therefore, contrasted with professional subtitling. Thus, since the quality of Italian fansubs has improved over time, being produced under conditions almost comparable with those found in the professional environment, the present research investigating the phenomenon is felt to be appropriate. In the light of the theories formulated by Lewis (1985), Nornes (2004), and Venuti (2008), relevance is given to the various approaches employed by fansubbers, relating to “foreignization” and “target-orientedness” as opposed to “domestication”, the guiding principles of mainstream subtitling. Against this background, a "hybrid proposal‟ relating to future subtitling norms is advanced. The proposal stems from a specific theoretical approach giving prominence to faithfulness in translation, namely a well-balanced blend of the best resources used both by professionals and amateurs in order to develop a set of norms allowing increased freedom to subtitlers