(Multi) media Translation: Concepts, Practices, and Research (review)

This is a collection of twenty-six papers presented at two international forums, the Misano (Italy) ‘Seminar on Multimedia and Translation’ (26–27 September 1997) and a conference in Berlin (15–16 October 1998) on ‘Quality and Standards in Audiovisual Language Transfer’.

It is the editors’ belief that the dichotomy media/multimedia is no longer a sustainable one, hence the parentheses around ‘Multi’ in the title. This signals their intent to examine both entities together in order to offer a complete picture of the areas covered by these terms.

The papers have been grouped into three sections. Part 1 contains seven papers dealing with basic concepts such as multimedia and translation and their practical implications. The papers investigate the relationship between media and multimedia; verbal translation and multimedia translation; the links between text, image, and sound; the new parameters of translating for the cinema, video, CD-ROM, the web, and so on. All papers in this part point to the necessity of interdisciplinarity among translation and communication studies, media and film studies, cultural studies, other humanities and social science disciplines, and information and computer sciences.

Part 2 focuses on policies and practices in multimedia translation in several European countries. The largest part of the volume, it features twelve papers on the current transformations in audiovisual media policy (Anne Jäckel, Reine Meylaerts) and the alternatives in the different modes of language transfer (Patrick zabalbeascoa, Natàlia Izard, and Laura Santamaria; Fotios Karamitroglou). Quality in language transfer is one of the major issues discussed in Part 2 (Eivor Gummerus and Catrine Paro, Felicity Müller, and Heulwen James).

The remaining seven papers make up the third part of this book and are dedicated to empirical research in translation studies. Part 3 observes the lack of a consistent research methodology for subtitling and discusses the issues of standard vs. nonstandard varieties in subtitles, the translator’s and the commissioner’s attitudes towards the language to be used on the screen (Jorge Diaz-Cintas), foreign language influence, the impact of subtitling on language acquisition (Marijke van de Poel and Géry d’ Ydewalle), and intra- and interlingual subtitling (Alexandra Assis Rosa).

One of the most interesting papers of the book, Anthony Pym’s epilogue, discusses four major issues in translation research and multimedia: fragmentation, target-side conditioning, subjectless research, and intercultural power.

The multimedia issues discussed in these papers cover a good number of European languages: English, Flemish, Catalan, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, French, Dutch, Danish, and Greek. This volume presents the state of research on multimedia and translation issues in the late 1990s. However, since this book was published (three years after the last conference), technology has progressed immeasurably, and many of the questions addressed in this volume have found different answers.