Europe House event on subtitling

Imperial College Translation Unit was proud to co-host a seminar entitled An introduction to subtitling: bridging the language and culture divide together with the European Commission Representation in the UK, and the VSI Group. The day-long event took place at Europe House on 26^th October, 2012 and also featured invited guests from the industry.

The seminar examined some of the most significant changes to have taken place recently in the subtitling field and included talks on the audiovisual industry and language-specific subtitling workshops, followed by an early-evening panel discussion attended by over 70 participants. 

Taking part from Imperial were Jorge Díaz-Cintas, Lindsay Bywood, Adriana Tortoriello and Emmanouela Patiniotaki. Feedback from the event was excellent, and there are plans to repeat it in future. (Lindsay Bywood)

Today at Imperial College London's Humanities research seminar series

‘What’s that got to do with anything? Coherence and the translation of relative clauses from Chinese to English’

Thursday 6th May in room S303A, Sherfield Building Level 3, 4pm

More information about the research seminars via the Humanities web page.

Interview with Jorge Diaz-Cintas

Portal 7, a website on translations for cinema television and theater, has an online interview with Jorge Diaz-Cintas.

Below, you can find two highlights from that interview.

hat exactly does AVT stand for?
"From a theoretical perspective, AVT is a scholarly field of study within the wider discipline of Translation Studies. Traditionally, it was considered to be a branch of translation parallel to literary or drama translation. One of the downsides of this perception is that the whole area was equated with the translation of films and many scholars used to refer to it as Film Translation or Cinema Translation. However, this is clearly a terminological misconception. AVT cannot be categorised only in terms of the genres it deals with, i.e. films, as it is obvious that audiovisual translators work with a panoply of programmes such as documentaries, DVD extras, sitcoms, advertisements, cartoons, reality shows, etc."

What is the cultural interest of AVT from a European perspective?
"In my opinion, and I think increasingly so in the EU’s opinion too, audiovisual communication in general, and AVT in particular, is truly essential for our (European) society. In these parts of the world, we’ve always needed translation to communicate with each other and it’s only natural that the increase in audiovisual output will bring a parallel increase in AVT. The European Parliament has clearly realised the power of the audiovisual word, as opposed to the printed word, to reach audiences and has taken swift action with the creation of their own television channel, EuroparlTV, where most material is subtitled in all EU languages."

You can read the entire interview, along with its various hyperlinks, by following this link.