Centre for Translation Studies – CenTraS
@UCL
Dr Luis Perez-Gonzales, University of Manchester, UK.
Performativity in Amateur Audio-visual Translation
Date: Tuesday, 17th March 2015
Time: 4-5 pm
Location: Medawar G01 Lankester LT, Gower Str, London, WC1E 6BT
Talk outline: Over
the last decade, the proliferation of self-mediated textualities has
empowered collectivities of non-professional translators to engage in
participatory subtitling practices. These new modes of engaged
subtitling agency are often part of a movement of aesthetic or political
resistance against global capitalist structures and institutions
through interventionist forms of translation, whether for aesthetic or
political reasons. Significantly, the strategies of mediation deployed
by amateur subtitlers are not always bound by loyalty to the linguistic
rationalism of screen characters or allegiance to traditional pragmatic
principles of interpersonal communication. Drawing on a range of
examples, this presentation will illustrate how affectivity emerges as a
powerful non-representational variable in amateur mediation, where
subtitles performatively intervene in the articulation and reception of
the filmic semiotic ensemble as it unfolds, rather than being simply
static superimposed signifiers. Against this backdrop,
non-representational theory, originally developed within the field of
human geography, would appear to be well positioned to supply the
conceptual network required to account for this expressive or
transformational role of amateur subtitling.
Biography: Luis
Pérez-González is Co-Director of the Centre for Translation and
Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester and author of Audiovisual Translation: Theories, Methods and Issues (Routledge 2014). Former editor of The Interpreter and Translator Trainer journal (St Jerome Publishing), he has recently guest edited special issues of The Journal of Language and Politics 11(2) (Translation and the Genealogy of Conflict, 2012) and The Translator 18(2)
(Non-professionals Translating and Interpreting: Participatory and
Engaged Perspectives, 2012, with Şebnem Susam-Saraeva). He has acted as a
consultant for the European Agency for Reconstruction, the European
Commission and Qatar Foundation/Hamad bin Khalifa University (Doha).
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