Speaker: Dr Dionysios Kapsaskis, University of Roehampton
Title: Beyond AVT: towards a critical re-evaluation of film translation
Date: February 10th, 2021
Time: 4-5 pm
Venue: on Collaborate Learn (through TS Bulletin Board) OR Guest Link: https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/05b8c27493de4edfb6d84fe190ee9ccd
Abstract: From its beginnings in the 1990s, Audiovisual Translation relied on descriptive concepts and methodologies and was firmly orientated towards pedagogy and the industry. While its empirical focus allowed this new discipline to thrive, it also restricted its potential for critical insight into cultural, aesthetic and (geo)political aspects of the phenomenon of film translation. As I will argue, the main reason for this is AVT’s reluctance to move beyond the conventional paradigm of translation as a unidirectional process of transfer across linguistic borders. Yet a number of studies in recent years (Nornes 2007; O'Sullivan 2011; Mamula and Patti 2016; Dwyer 2017; Kapsaskis 2017; Ďurovičová 2021) have demonstrated that translation is embedded in every aspect of the production and distribution of films, in the forms of intra- and extradiegetic translations, deliberate non-translations, partial translations and mistranslations, as well as narrativisations of translation in cinematic plots. This excess of translation in the cinema suggests two things. First, that translation offers a new and powerful critical lens for the analysis of films; and second that film translation must be examined not as a process of transfer but as a transformative force that has shaped cinema historically and continues to do so today.
Bio note: Dionysios Kapsaskis is Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton, UK, where he teaches translation and transcreation theory and practice. His interests and publications are in the areas of comparative literature, translation and film. He is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization (2021).