Anna Matamala

Accessible Opera: Overcoming Linguistic and Sensorial Barriers

Abstract The desire to make media available for all has been rapidly accepted and implemented by most European countries. Opera, as one of the many audiovisual representations, also falls under the category of production which needs to be made accessible and this article aims to analyse how opera has gone through a complete transformation to become a cultural event for all, overcoming not only linguistic but also sensorial barriers. The first part of the article analyses the various forms of translation associated with opera and the main challenges they entail. The second presents different systems used to make opera accessible to the sensorially challenged, highlighting their main difficulties. Examples from research carried out at the Barcelonas Liceu opera house are presented to illustrate various modalities, especially audio description. All in all, it is our aim to show how translated-related processes have made it possible to open opera to a wider audience despite some initial reluctance.

Translating documentaries: from Neanderthals to the Supernanny

Abstract This article analyses the main features of documentary translation using a corpus of 20 documentaries translated by the author from English into Catalan over a two-year period (2006–07). After a short review of the literature on documentary translation, the main characteristics of this type of translation in terms of topics, speakers and transfer modes are described. Special emphasis is put on language register transfer in non-fictional programmes, taking into account mode, field and tenor. Finally, further challenges such as the translation of proper nouns, comprehension problems or mistranscriptions are presented.

Audio-description reloaded: An analysis of visual scenes in 2012 and Hero

This article explores whether the so-called new “cinema of attractions”, with its supposed focus on visual effects to the detriment of storytelling, requires a specific approach to audio-description (AD). After some thoughts on film narrative in this type of cinema and the way in which it incorporates special effects, selected scenes with AD from two feature films, 2012 (directed by Emmerich) and Hero (directed by Zhang Yimou), are analysed. 2012 is a disaster movie aiming to thrill the audience with action. Hero is an equally visual movie but its imagery has an aesthetic purpose. The analysis investigates how space, time and action are treated in the films and the ADs, and how the information is presented in terms of focalization, timing and phrasing. The results suggest that effect-driven narratives require carefully timed and phrased ADs that devote much attention to the prosody of the AD script, its interaction with sounds and the use of metaphor.

Audiovisual translation. When modalities merge

Audiovisual translation (AVT) has for some time enjoyed a special place in translation studies (TS), with many conferences, monographs and special issues in prestigious journals devoted to the many specialities within the field. An effort has been placed in bridging the two traditionally isolated realms of theory and practice, and recently a multidisciplinary approach has been identified as the way forward when dealing with research and training in AVT. The world of AVT is indeed a natural interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary habitat which mirrors the many audiovisual translation modes that nowadays merge in the very complex scenario of media formats and their broadcast. The ever-changing world of technology is leading a new direction in which people continuously interact with electronic devices. In the many available platforms (cloud, smart, connected, hybrid, etc) and formats (television, DVD, web, mobile, cinema, opera, theatre), several translation modes sharing and making available the information within are to be found. Traditional modalities such as dubbing, voice-over or subtitling are used next to newer media accessibility modalities such as audio description, sign language and subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing, which entail intersemiotic transfer processes that go well beyond traditional linguistic or even cultural definitions of translation. Concerning research, traditional methods in the field of AVT, mainly based on case studies and descriptive approaches, are giving way to more experimental and applied studies that use methods drawn from Psychology, Communication and Social Science studies. In this fast-changing scenario, this special section aims to survey the present state of affairs, and more importantly to offer a window into the future in AVT, mapping a very dynamic field within the realm of TS. It includes five contributions by authors from three different continents who tackle section such as evaluation of text chunking on live respoken subtitles by means of eye-tracking, subtitle reading in a second language, game localisation, subtitles in speech-language therapy and interlingual subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH). Despite the willingness of the editors to create a special section with an extensive array of topics, subtitling seems to concentrate most of the interest in this volume, albeit with various approaches. The two first contributions make use of eye-tracking to investigate effects of text chunking on subtitling and reading second language subtitles, respectively. In their article, Rajendran, Duchowski, Orero, Martı́nez and Romero-Fresco evaluate subtitles created with different chunking systems to determine, by means of eyetracking, if segmentation influences the viewing experience. Four subtitle styles are evaluated in the study: no segmentation, word-for-word, chunked by phrase and chunked by sentence. Data from 24 participants are quantitatively analysed in terms of mean fixation durations, proportion of gazepoints and fixations in the subtitles Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, 2013 Vol. 21, No. 1, 2 4, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2012.722656

Opera Translation: An Annotated Bibliography

This annotated bibliography is a product of our long-standing interest in opera translation and media accessibility. It covers earlier works in the field from musicology, as well as the later works from within translation studies; both reflect the multifarious nature of opera, which requires examination from a variety of perspectives. The bibliography includes entries in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish, because these are the languages we are familiar with; nevertheless, many of the entries offer examples also from other language pairs. We include works of specialists in the field, such as Ronnie Apter, Mark Herman, Klaus Kaindl, Dinda Gorlée, Lucile Desblache and Marta Mateo, but we also review articles which have been overlooked yet are still significant in the realm of opera and its translation, such as those by W.H Auden and Sigmund Spaeth. Although the bibliography cannot lay claim to comprehensiveness, we believe that the selection offered will be useful to future researchers in the field.

Assessing the quality of post-edited wildlife documentaries

ABSTRACT This article presents the results of an experiment to assess the quality of post-edited wildlife documentary films to be voiced-over and off-screen dubbed, which was compared to the quality of human translation. The hypothesis of the article is that there are no significant differences between translated and post-edited texts in terms of quality. Twelve MA students translated and post-edited two excerpts of an English wildlife documentary into Spanish. Six professional translators then assessed both the translations and post-edited texts by: (1) grading the documents, (2) correcting them using a Multidimensional Quality Metrics-based error classification that takes into account documentary translation specificities, and (3) answering questionnaires on their impressions. The results confirm the hypothesis by indicating that the quality of post-edited and translated wildlife documentary films is significantly similar.

The ALST Project: Technologies for Audio Description

Matamala describes the ALST project, which aims to research the implementation of three technologies (speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis) in two audiovisual transfer modes (voice-over and audio description). Matamala focuses on the experiments related to audio description within the ALST project: firstly, tests in which speaker diarization and speech recognition systems were used to generate an audio description transcript; secondly, experiments in which the effort involved in creating, translating and post-editing an audio description were compared and, finally, tests in which end users assessed audio descriptions created using a text-to-speech system.

Variations on the Pear Tree experiment: different variables, new results?

Inspired by the Pear Stories Project, the Pear Tree Project has investigated how different cultures and languages describe the same film, in order to apply its findings to audio description (AD). Participants from different countries were asked to ‘write down what they saw’ in a controlled setting. This article proposes an alternative experiment, also based on the original Pear Stories Project, which aims to shed light on two issues: how different describer profiles (translation students with AD training/without AD training) and different instructions concerning the target audience profiles (blind/non-blind) could alter the final production. The results are analysed in this paper, taking into account the elements covered in the original Pear Stories Project as well as some additional elements proposed by the authors.

Audio description and social acceptability

Audio description (AD) is the accessibility service and modality which has developed most in academia in recent years (Maszerowska et al., 2014). This development can be measured in different areas beyond output quantity, such as specific research topics, funded research projects, approaches, and research methodologies. This Special Issue is a good example of the cutting-edge research on audio description, and shows its direction and intentionality. This collection of articles is also representative of the geographical distribution of research and researchers, and the areas where international financing has been provided. Audio description as an academic field started shyly – or perhaps cautiously – following closely the directions pointed by practitioners (Benecke, 2004; Snyder, 2008). This docile attitude changed fast when audio description was adopted as a modality in the field of Translation Studies (Orero 2005) and more accurately in Audiovisual Translation (AVT) (Gambier, 2008; Matamala, 2006; Matamala and Orero, 2007; Bernabé and Orero, forthcoming). Audio description moved from being a service, where the focus was on meeting the user expectations and needs following a clinical approach. End users were considered – and are still considered – people with sight impairments. The first academic studies on media accessibility services always departed from a superficial study on a clinical description and classification of the physiological features. This clinical approach has been changing gradually, and the reason was the declaration by the Committee on the Audio Description and Social Acceptability*

Audio Description and Accessibility Studies: A Work in Progress

This book is the second we have edited in English focusing on audio description (AD). Now the scope is diametrically different from the previous publication (Maszerowska, Matamala, & Orero, 2014), where one film was analysed from many perspectives. While the former could be considered to have followed a bottom-up approach, the present publication adopts a top-down approach. Audio Description: New Perspectives Illustrated looked at AD from the perspective of the many components in film language and narrative, its production and terminology. The result was an interesting in-depth analysis of 11 building blocks that need to be taken into consideration when embarking upon writing an AD script. The aim in the present book, in contrast, is to open the lens as widely as possible in order to take a panoramic picture of new approaches in current research in AD. The idea is also to set a long exposure time, hoping the photo will not be blurred. To understand fully the resulting image, though, there is a need to know what surrounds this image, in which field it was taken.