Public lecture: Performativity in Amateur Audio-visual Translation

Centre for Translation Studies – CenTraS

@UCL

Dr Luis Perez-Gonzales, University of Manchester, UK.

Performativity in Amateur Audio-visual Translation

Date: Tuesday, 17^th 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).