CIM Distinguished Lecture Series 2022-23-01: Multimodality, Translation and Audiovisual Translation

Abstract: In a globalised world with unpredictable tensions and a digitalised world with divides in the use of technology, “translation” never stops playing a major role in several domains of activity, from trade to sciences, from the international relationships to cultural exchanges, from labelling food products to instructions how to start and maintain a machine. In a few decades, this double move of globalisation and digitalisation has transformed and is still transforming our ways of communicating. Communication is more and more made of a complex set of (verbal and non-verbal) signs. This is not completely new, but the frequency and the diversity of multimodal interactions are impacting our daily life, blurring categories such as “translation”. The audiovisual translation (AVT) is a meaningful example of this intersemiotic translation, in terms of diversity and number of signs, and consequently a dynamic research field – coping with different challenging modes. More important, the AVT field implies to re-visit several concepts of Translation Studies (TS). 

Today, in different societies, “translation” is in competition with other terms, such as localisation, adaptation, transcreation, language mediation, etc. A certain number of other concepts used in TS must also be reconsidered, as text, sense, authorship, translation unit, quality, to name a few.  To investigate and explain changes, different research methods in multimodal TS will be referred to. Because of this multimodal dimension, and because of the diversity of research programmes in AVT, the map of AVTS will be questioned to a certain extent while the borders of TS are moving with the borders of a significant number of other disciplines.

Contact Professor Bingham Zheng for more information.