Audiovisual Texts Research Articles

Police as cop show viewers

Despite the popularity of Australian television drama and reality series featuring police, there has been a paucity of research into what these programs communicate about real world policing. These ‘cop shows’ are productive forms of public relations for police agencies, particularly the co-produced reality TV variety, and as such are valuable broadcasting and policing commodities. As complex audio-visual texts, cop shows can generate myriad meanings and messages. As cultural objects these programs also rely upon and generate expressions of national identity. Drawing on 25 interviews with policing students and serving and retired police officers, this qualitative research provides insight into how prospective, current and retired police interpret televisual representations of the profession. It was found that interviewees more deeply embedded in the police culture were more cynical of the public relations messages and contested the role of women, while aspirants to the profession were more likely to endorse depictions of a diverse work force. Although interviewees regarded Australian cop shows as reflecting national attributes and cultural context, they reflected on aspects of cop shows produced in other countries to articulate what locally produced cop shows were not.

Multimodality in Subtitling

This article discusses the concept of multimodality of audiovisual texts in relation to results from an online questionnaire targeted to professional Finnish subtitlers. Audiovisual texts, such as movies, are multimodal; they use both visual and auditory channels to convey meaning. The aim of this study is to examine the experiences and opinions of Finnish subtitlers regarding audiovisual texts’ multimodality and how they use the pictures and sounds in the subtitling processes. Research data was collected with an online questionnaire that was answered by 42 subtitlers. The results indicate that, even though professional Finnish subtitlers are a heterogenous group with varying experiences and opinions, they recognize the importance of audiovisual texts’ multiple modes in the translation process. Multimodality is an asset to subtitlers; they can use the different modes, for instance, to make condensations and reductions in the subtitling process. Based on the results, I suggest that subtitling and subtitles should be characterized foremost by their multimodal nature as they create meaning through various modes in interaction with each other. It is this intertwined web of meaning-making in which subtitlers operate to convey messages of audiovisual texts to other cultures and languages.

The Labor of Curating: Fandom, Museums, and the Value of Fan Heritage

The Labor of Curating: Fandom, Museums, and the Value of Fan Heritage

“Having Walked Alongside You”: A Conversational Exchange on Territory and Sound in Motion

As two artist-scholars engaged in research-creation, our goal with this project was to enact a performance/discussion regarding settler-colonialism, sound, performance, and our relationships to land, body and time. During the initial “lockdown phase” of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, we carried out a mediated conversation via WhatsApp voice memos, hiking towards each other along and across the Oldman River, then retracing the other’s path back to our respective points of origin. This collaborative project aims to decolonize the academic paper through a process which combines textual analysis, experiential learning, improvisational performance, and activated writing to ask questions of the relationships between sound, land, and colonial institutions. How does movement through space, and hearing the land, affect our experience of discussing texts? How is discussion informed by, say, the participants being separated (or connected) by a river? What richness exists in oral/aural exchanges that are lost in the textualizing process? What does it mean to move through occupied Blackfoot territory while discussing decolonialism? The structure of this conversational exchange unfolds in loops rather than in the linear standard of academic writing. This “essay” was originally devised as an audiovisual text, but during further revisions, we continued our experimentations with form. The result has taken shape in dual outputs of both sound and text, each form containing affective and sensorial elements not found in the other, creating parallel yet distinct “texts.” While this is an imperfect strategy for those who experience sight/hearing related disabilities, we also recognize that some sensorial experiences are untranslatable into the language of the other senses. We hope that we have encoded each experience of sound and text with enough richness for them to be enjoyed individually, and we invite those who can, to experience how the two forms play off of each other. To this effect, the form of this text focuses on the relationship between the content of our conversation and how it is presented, and between our conversation and the writers, artists and movements we have referenced. We also hope to emphasize our relationality with the land we walked through, the creators of the sounds we listened to, between us, the co-creators of this “text,” as well as the relationship we create with you, the listener/reader experiencing it. As artists/writers/curators, it is a challenge to find alternative textual formats that appropriately reflect artistic research-creation methodologies while also satisfying the demands of academic knowledge dissemination. This collaboration explores the possibility for academic conversations to escape the confines of learning institutions into a space of praxis and embodied experience in motion.

Why remember? Representations of the past in non-fiction films: fabrication, re-construction and interpretation of the collective memory(s)

ABSTRACT Interpretations of the past in audiovisual texts have increased exponentially in recent years, giving rise to the need to analyse a context saturated by visual representations of history that are replacing oral storytelling and traditional narratives. This article offers a reflection on the visual uses of memory and the representation of the past, focusing on documentary cinema at three different historical moments, based on the analysis of representative films from each period: first, the WWII propaganda documentary as the basis for propaganda film rhetoric in the transmission of history; second, the contemporary non-fiction film, in its self-reflexive, subjective essay form; and third, the web documentary as a more recent manifestation of a hybrid multimedia format that is essentially interpretative.

A relevance-theoretic account of translating jokes with sexual innuendos inModern Familyinto Spanish

AbstractThe main purpose of this paper is to analyse jokes containing sexual innuendos in ambiguous utterances from the first two seasons ofModern Familyand their translation into Spanish using relevance theory. More often than not, the ambiguity and sexual innuendos are also reflected in the Spanish versions analysed. Hence, in all those cases, in relevance-theoretical terms, the cognitive effects intended in the source text (ST), including humorous ones, will also be accessible to target text (TT) viewers. It, therefore, follows that the pragmatic scenario is preserved in the TT, sometimes at the expense of a sacrifice in the semantic scenario. In audio-visual texts, ambiguity may also impact the visual channel. Although in some cases the visual component may render the translator’s task difficult, in others it may act as an aid to both the translator and TT viewer, contributing to the yielding of humorous effects.

Coherence formation during narrative text processing: a comparison between auditory and audiovisual text presentation in 9- to 12-year-old children

In an experiment with 114 children aged 9–12 years, we compared the ability to establish local and global coherence of narrative texts between auditory and audiovisual (auditory text and pictures) presentation. The participants listened to a series of short narrative texts, in each of which a protagonist pursued a goal. Following each text, we collected the response time to a query word that was either associated with a near or a distant causal antecedent of the final sentence. Analysis of these response times indicated that audiovisual presentation has advantages over auditory presentation for accessing information relevant for establishing both local and global coherence, but there are indications that this effect may be slightly more pronounced for global coherence.

Phenomenon of impact of audio-visual media texts with violent content: socio-pedagogical discourse

In this article, the authors have carried out a hermeneutic analysis of the problem of violence among adolescents in audio-visual media texts and the peculiarities of this violent content impact. The material of the study is movies, TV programs, electronic versions of media texts reflecting the content of the violent segment in the adolescent environment. The main method is the hermeneutic analysis of discourse, which is based on the methodology created by A. Silverblatt and U. Eco. A hermeneutic analysis of audio-visual media texts with violent content showed that: - violence in different media texts differs in its peculiarities of expression, but at the same time, it is similar in social issues, methods and means of expressiveness, a tragic component in the narrative and image content; - the worldview of the audio-visual media texts authors is reduced to the position of fixing different types of violence; - a specific feature of the media products is the connection to the real life situation; - the value dominants of the main characters - adolescents (aggressors) are aggression, cruelty, etc.; - reasons for committing violent actions: conflict situations in the group, with people of different age and status; unrequited love; desire to raise the credibility, etc.

ТЕМНЫЕ КОРОЛЕВЫ ТЕМНЫХ ВЕКОВ: КОНСТРУИРОВАНИЕ НОВОЙ ИДЕНТИЧНОСТИ В ИСТОРИЧЕСКОМ СЕРИАЛЕ

Serial today is a popular and dynamically developing form of audiovisual text, presenting the viewer with a full-fledged narrative. Serials representing the historical past are particularly important. Due to the peculiarities of production and distribution, historical serials create an extensive and frequently updated pool of representations of historical epochs in the media space. The tendency towards increasing racial diversity in film and television has recently led to the active involvement of non-European actors in TV-projects representing the European Middle Ages. Their appearance on the screens led to a number of effects. They not only revived the audience’s interest in history, but also activated protective tendencies in society, forcing them to wage a discursive struggle for cultural heritage and historical authenticity. Operating with such concepts as race, heritage and authenticity in a single context requires scientific reflection and theoretical comprehension. This research focuses on the problem of reassembling the image of the past by incorporating racial and national minorities into audiovisual historical representations. Based on a research of a range of serials from the first quarter of the 21st century we concluded that the origins of this tendency date back in the late 2000s. The constructing of representations of the Middle Ages under the influence of the inclusive trend went through three successive stages: from the using of symbolism of dark skin color to the constructing of a racially diverse society. At the last stage, there is a wide presence of actors of different races and nationalities in roles of all plans, including as the main characters, whose historical prototypes were Europeans. This trend is aimed at constructing a new European identity, by “ancientizing” the presence and increasing the cultural contribution of ethnic minorities in European history. The new image of the past, consistently creating on the screen, is meant to remove the blame for the colonial legacy and reduce the degree of social tension.

CHILDREN'S SONGS AS AUDIO-VISUAL TEXTS AND DOMESTICATION STRATEGY IN TRANSLATION OF CHILDREN'S SONGS: IN THE EXAMPLE OF ?OH, DU LIEBER AUGUSTIN? AND ?HANSCHEN KLEIN?

In the present study, it is aimed to deal with children's songs within the scope of audio-visual texts and to briefly explain the strategy of domestication in translation. It is also aimed to present the domestication translation with examples from the target text or target songs. Apart from this, the study aims to reveal the importance of the translation strategy chosen because children's songs are appeal text type and the audience consists of children. The Turkish translations of two German children's songs are handled in the article and it is determined that the translator aims at translation for the recipient, and the translator achieves her goal because Turkish culture and norms and the needs of Turkish children are highlighted. The translator's use of the German figure Augustin with the Turkish figure Keloglan and the German proper name “Hanschen” (Hanscik-Kucuk Hans) with the Turkish personal name “Can” and removing foreign elements from the target songs reveal the reason behind her achievement of her goal.

Developing awareness of interference errors in translation. An English-Spanish pilot study in popular science and audiovisual transcripts

The use of astronomy discourse in the form of written and web/audiovisual texts has been gaining ground in undergraduate courses of specialized translation. These materials have been used at the University of Leon for the last four years during the last semester of the degree Filologia Moderna: Ingles , as part of the course Traduccion ingles -espanol II , basically geared towards awareness raising of translation problems and solutions available. The aim of this paper is twofold: a) to show the main differences between the language of astronomy in different genres (Stolze 2009; Byrne 2012; Tessuto, Bait 2017) in English and in audiovisual texts (Diaz Cintas, Remael 2007; Chaume 2012) in English and Spanish and b) to show which linguistic areas are more problematic for undergraduate students, e.g. types of technical dialects, nominalization chains, metaphoric language, among others (Rabadan 1991; Shuttleworth 2014). We will use two small comparable subcorpora of written research articles and popular science, and an audiovisual corpus of popular science in order to identify a) similarities and differences at different levels and b) a hierarchy of relevance. Our taxonomy will include linguistic, cultural, genre-based, and semiotic problems and their linguistic manifestations. We will also use an En-Es parallel corpus (Gutierrez Lanza 2011) which will include the originals mentioned above and the translations made by undergraduate students during this period. They will be compared with a “standard” target text in order to identify which features are more problematic in English-Spanish transfer. The results will be collated both statistically and qualitatively so as to produce a tagset of errors to be applied to learners’ corpora. The procedure is replicable for other domains, genres, and language pairs. These corpus-based data En-Es will be used to produce language pair focused training materials (Lopez-Rodriguez, Tercedor-Sanchez 2008; Rabadan 2010).

La traducción de términos especializados con efecto humorístico en el texto audiovisual: los chistes científicos en The Big Bang Theory

Uno de los retos más fascinantes que se plantean en traducción audiovisual es la transferencia del humor, que puede estar presente en distintas formas y quedar sujeto a elementos visuales o léxicos. Esta tarea se dificulta cuando hay expresiones o palabras ineludibles, como es el caso de los términos científicos presentes en los diálogos de The Big Bang Theory. En este trabajo analizaremos una serie de chistes y juegos de palabras empleados en la popular sitcom, haciendo hincapié en aquellos que contengan terminología especializada, con el fin de observar las soluciones aportadas por el traductor para mantener el mismo grado de especificidad al tiempo que transfiere la carga humorística para provocar las risas entre el público.

Do You Second That Emotion?

This paper discusses the emotions experienced by subtitlers who subtitle sensitive audiovisual material. “Sensitive audiovisual material” refers to audiovisual texts which deal with controversial and emotive topics, such as abuse, war, torture. This topic has remained under-researched in subtitling, despite having been sporadically explored in other fields of translation (Hubscher-Davidson, 2017; Rojo and Ramos Caro, 2016; Tabakowska, 2016).
 The data presented in this paper expand upon and complement the findings discussed in Perdikaki and Georgiou (2020) based on an online survey completed by 170 subtitlers. For the current paper, the data discussed come from an online focus group with three professional subtitlers and face-to-face interviews with one freelance subtitler as well as a team interview with two in-house quality control editors. Having confirmed in our previous study that many subtitlers are affected by the sensitive AV material they subtitle, this paper aims at a more nuanced exploration of how subtitlers regulate emotions elicited on-the-job, offering specific examples as well as emotion management techniques. Finally, the perspective of emotional responsiveness, depending on socio-economic contexts as well as the linguistic arsenal of the subtitler, is briefly discussed.

Integrating Vermeer’s Skopos Theory into Newmark’s Strategies for Exploring Cultural Problems in Subtitles: A Case Study of the American series Thirteen Reasons Why

The present study explored some basic cultural problems that translators face during subtitling audiovisual texts, particularly TV series from English into Arabic. The study also provided functional analysis of the solutions occasionally chosen by professional Netflix subtitlers to overcome those cultural problems. The study aimed at showing whether the strategies frequently chosen by the subtitler to deal with particular problematic cultural features were equally successful in achieving functional adequacy in the TT. The researcher integrated Vermeer’s functionally based Skopos theory into Newmark's translation procedures to provide a descriptive functional analysis of 44 examples taken from the American series, Thirteen Reasons Why. The content-analysis led to two main findings. The first was related to the most frequent strategies used to render the intended skopos (functions) of the source cultural features; paraphrase being the highest in use since it was used 18 times out of 44. The second finding was that the rate of frequency of strategies chosen correlated strictly with the rate of functional adequacy of these strategies. Paraphrase achieved its intended functions adequately in 15 out of 18 examples.

Translating Lucy

Since the beginning of the cinema industry, literature has been influencing movies both in direct and indirect forms. Intersemiotic translation is the main tool on that process once it involves transferring meaning from a system of signs to another. It generally consists of the translation of written media into an audiovisual text (JACOBSON, 1969), taking into consideration all the different specifications and characteristics of each support. Under the perspective of Translation Studies, this article aims to reflect upon the intersemiotic translation of the character Lucy Pevensie, from the literary work “The Chronicles of Narnia: The lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” to the cinematic narrative released in 2005, directed by Andrew Adamson and produced by Walden Media. For that, the presence of feminist aspects in both written and filmic depiction of the character are analyzed. The results show that being produced in different cultural moments, book and film bring different perspectives on feminism, as the film intends to update the literary work by recovering similar meanings though different narrative audiovisual strategies.

Orijinal Netflix dizisi “Dark” örnekleriyle görsel-işitsel metinlerde çokkipli metin çözümleme (çevriyazı) yöntemi

Çokkipli metin çözümlemesi görsel-işitsel ürünleri çeviri amaçlı incelediğimiz ve çözümlediğimiz bir yöntemdir. Çeşitli düzgülerin bir araya getirerek oluşturduğu görsel-işitsel ürünlerde kiplikler çok önemli bir rol oynar. Bir anlatıda görüntü, imge, sembol, hareket, karakterlerin duruşu veya beden dili, çekim türü, renk, müzik ve diğer tüm ögeler sözel göstergelerle aynı anlam yaratma potansiyeline sahip kipliklerdir. Hepsinin bir arada bulunuşu ve kipliklerin etkileşimli ortaklığı, birbirini bütünleyerek anlamı oluşturur. Görsel-işitsel çeviride kiplikleri çözümlemek ve anlam bileşenlerinin farkına varmak, görsel-işitsel çeviri eğitimi alan öğrencilere ve çevirmenlere bütünsel ve işlevsel bir bakış açısı kazandırmaya yardımcı olur. Görsel-işitsel çeviride kiplikleri çözümlemek, bir taraftan bütünsel ve işlevsel bir bakış açısı kazandırmaya yardımcı olacağı gibi diğer taraftan altyazı, dublaj, voice-over özellikle sesli betimleme gibi görsel-işitsel çeviri türlerinde farklı veriler sunarak, çevirinin dilsel boyutundan öteye taşınması açısından önemlidir. Çokkipli çevriyazı yöntemi ile çalışmak ve görsel-işitsel metinleri çözümlemek çevirmen adaylarının temel edinçlerine yenilerini katar, görsel-işitsel çeviri edincini geliştirir. Bu çalışmada çokkipli çevriyazı yönteminin görsel-işitsel metinlerde nasıl uygulandığı betimlenerek gösterildi. Netflix’te yayımlanan Almanca “Dark” dizisinden birkaç sahne bu yöntemle çözümlendi ve görsel-işitsel bir metni bütün bileşenleriyle kavramanın çeviri açısından önemi tartışıldı. Bunun sonucunda bu yöntemin görsel-işitsel çeviri eğitiminde uygulanabileceği görüldü.

Las enseñanzas de los thrillers epidémicos al estudio de la Covid-19

Introducción: Una excesiva confianza aleja la prevención de lo imprevisible y el cine a través de los thrillers epidémicos ha sido un gran maestro en mantener viva las incertidumbres. Objetivo: Analizar diez películas basadas en enfermedades zoonóticas que a través de sus historias generan ideas para aplicarlas desde una comunicación en salud al estudio de la COVID-19. Metodología: Selección de películas a través de la base de datos IMDb (Internet Movie Date Base), análisis fílmico y valorativo de los textos audiovisuales como obras de comunicación. Resultados: Mostrar epidemias a una cierta distancia desde la pantalla se ven lejanas e improbables, pero al final invitan a pensar y dan toques de atención de que algún día esos escenarios pueden convertirse en cercanos y probables. Se destaca de las películas la importancia de mantener distancias entre los animales reservorios y los humanos para lograr evitar futuras zoonosis virales. Conclusiones: Prevenir en salud es cuidar y cuando se afrontan pandemias de rápida propagación e incierta previsión como la COVID-19, la mejor receta para su gestión es aprender de actuaciones pasadas, extraer ideas y encontrar soluciones a nuevas preguntas.

The ‘Fast Runner’ Trilogy, Inuit Cultural Memory, and Knowledge (Re-)Production

AbstractThis paper reads the Isuma ‘Fast Runner’ trilogy –Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner(2001),The Journals of Knud Rasmussen(2006),Before Tomorrow(2008) – as contemporary digital video instantiations of Inuit cultural memory and knowledge (re-)production; as fixed audiovisual texts ironically documenting and archiving a repertoire of traditional cultural folkways, reinscribing them in the present as still-living cultural practices. This is achieved in the films through Isuma’s unique approach to cinematic style, combining long takes and natural light with the freedom and unpredictability afforded by the digital format. In the end, Isuma’s openness to post-literate media forms emerges as an ideal approach to the representation of specific posthuman Indigenous identities.

Needs Analysis and Teachers’ Perceptions: A Study of English Undergraduate Students

Needs Analysis in the context of language-learning-teaching is an important process to design a certain course and syllabus. It helps course designers to set objectives, choose content, method of instruction, appropriate teaching aids, and classroom activities for different courses. This paper reports the perceptions of the researchers on the English language learning needs of the English undergraduate students of Shaheed Benazir Bhutto University Sheringal, Pakistan. The data is based on the researchers’ personal experience and first-hand observation of the population as the researchers have been teaching in the target context for about a decade. Furthermore, the researchers have always been in discussion with their students and colleagues about the target students’ English learning needs, preferred learning styles, motivation in learning English, interest, strengths/weaknesses, and attitude toward English learning in the target setting. Learners’ assignments, exam answer sheets, and presentations have also been used as a source of data collection. A needs analysis model proposed by Hutchinson and Waters (1987) has been applied in order to analyze the data. The results show that the students lack well grammatical sentences, have poor spellings, capitalization problems, limited vocabulary, unaware of collocations, poor/slow reading comprehension, and lack effective presentation skills. Furthermore, most of the students have lack of involvement in classroom activities and feel shy in speaking the English language. It was reported that the provision of authentic material, interesting activities, suitable audio-visual aids, relevant texts, language labs, and other logistic arrangements can better help them in learning the English language. The findings demonstrate that the students wished to have a learner-centered-course that helps them excel in their academic life and learning the English language.

Homoeroticising Archaic Wind Music: A Rhizomatic Return to Ancient China

This article explores Archaic Wind music (gufeng 古風) and its implications for Sinophone articulations. Gufeng can be categorised as a particular type of music with lyrical, musical, and symbolic references to ancient China that is produced, consumed, and circulated within an online fan community. While the lyrics of gufeng music express a post-loyalist yearning to return to the fictional roots of “Cultural China,” its video adaptations deconstruct the authenticity of such cultural roots in their homoerotic subtext. Exploring the audio-visual texts of the gufeng music, I suggest that it shows a rhizomatic return to ancient China that disorients the routes to the past.