In the global village of today, AVT is a form of communication expanding at a mind-boggling rate. Its active engagement with social, cultural, political, and technological changes calls for increased specialisation and greater diversification on the part of practitioners, trainers, and researchers alike. AVT crosses many disciplinary borders and offers a world of possibilities and challenges to its users. Markets worldwide are changing fast with distribution policies and strategies being shaped by political decisions, economic factors and audience expectations. AVT, from both the traditional translational perspective as well as the more encompassing accessibility angle, is considered to be a tool for social integration. The conference organisers are especially interested in the progress being made in turning today’s information society into an information society ‘for all’ and in the links between AVT and other disciplines within translation studies, or even text production. The traditional notion of what constitutes a ‘text’ has been eroded and this has led to a converging of research areas and a need for more interdisciplinary approaches.
This conference aims to map the current status of AVT profession, research, production, and consumer needs. The complexity and the ways in which research input, technology, user needs and the business aspects of AVT intertwine, merits serious thought. By taking stock of developments on these and other fronts, Media for All 4 will address the many questions raised by the rapid expansion of audiovisual communication, rising to the challenges posed by translation in the global market.
Through papers, panels, and round-table discussions, we hope to investigate these issues and to be able to promote new perspectives. We are inviting presentations reflecting the developments of our rapidly changing times within the scope of the themes listed below, and with a focus on audiovisual translation and media accessibility:
- Language transfer on screen: dubbing, interpreting, narration, opera and theatre surtitling, subtitling, voice-over, localisation, fandubbing, fansubbing
- Media access / cultural access: subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, live subtitling, respeaking, audio description, audio subtitling, sign language interpreting
- Innovation and new technologies: formats, platforms, 3D
- AVT in the global market: production and distribution, new trends, tools, needs, project management
- Professional practice: labour market, working conditions, standardisation and harmonisation, productivity, costs
- Professional ethics: public image of translators, relationship with clients and public organisations, the role of professional organisations, intellectual property rights, crowdsourcing and amateur translation
- Lobbies, policies, legislation, law enforcement and audience involvement
- History of AVT
- Quality standards and quality assurance
- Literacy and language learning/acquisition
- AVT research, old and new: globalisation, cultural transfer and nationalism
- Different (interdisciplinary) approaches (cognitive psychology, linguistics, discourse analysis, cultural studies, film studies...)
- Reception research and audience needs, broadcasting for minority audiences
- Censorship and manipulation
- AVT training: curricula, new needs, standards, didactics and skills
Proposals
Papers are allotted 20-minute slots to be followed by 10 minutes discussion
(30 minutes in total). Proposals for papers should be presented on the
abstract proposal form which can be downloaded from here.
Abstracts of 250-350 words should be sent to Jorge Díaz-Cintas by 15th November 2010.
Notification of acceptance will be sent by 20 January 2011.
Conference venue
The 3 day conference, 29 June – 1 July 2011, will take place at Senate House.
Workshops venue
The workshops will be held at the Department of Humanities at Imperial College London on 28 June 2011. The topics and prices can be found here.
Official Language
English
Publication
A selection of the papers presented at the conference will be published by
the organising committee
Important Dates
Deadline for the submission of proposals........15 November 2010
Notification of acceptance of proposals..............20 January 2011
Early bird registration deadline.............................20 April 2011