Captioning and Revoicing Screened Dialogue: The Pragmatics of Audiovisual Translation

This book is addressed to students who are already familiar with the challenges of specialised translation but need specific tools for translating audiovisual texts. Audiovisual Translation (AVT) entails a textual competence that takes into account the very nature of screened dialogue and the way it interacts in each frame with the visual code and with other, verbal and nonverbal, elements in the soundtrack. Both subtitling (captioning) and dubbing (revoicing) require awareness of the pragmatics of audiovisual texts, which involves not only sociolinguistic and culture-specific issues but also technical constraints inherent to the adaptation processes. The captioning/revoicing perspective is aimed at giving room to an interdisciplinary approach which combines linguistic and semiotic readings of screened dialogue. The approach is theoretical and hands-on at the same time. Hence the term “pragmatics” in the title is to be understood both as a reference to the subdiscipline of linguistics, particularly in its focus on the importance of context to infer meaning, and to the Greek word πράγμα, “doing, deed, execution, business, task, difficulty, annoyance, intrigue” (Feyerabend).