Chapter 9: New directions from the new media

Blum-Kulka and Levenston suggest that lexical simplification is typical of translations, and Vinay and Darbelnet make many generalizations about the translation process, including the assertion that the TT is normally longer than the ST. It is with the advent of large computerized databases and readilyavailable tools that these hypotheses could actually be tested on large amounts of text.

Audiovisual Translation Even more dramatic developments in translation studies have occurred in the field of audiovisual translation, most notably subtitling.

Though Katharina Reiss had included what she had termed an „audio-medial‟ text type, she had scarcely developed it, and indeed her definition seemed to refer more to fields such as advertising rather than film and documentary translation.

His findings are rather restricted and perhaps typical of the time in which he conducted the research: his first finding is that „it is feasible to study audiovisual translation within the scope of translation studies‟, which may have been important at a time when audiovisual translation was struggling for credibility and visibility.

„In this sense, it is possible to affirm that audiovisual translation differs from other types of translation in that the non-existence of an image tied to the verbal text in these other types allows for free translation of an existing sentence, or a play with words, or a joke, for example, without this causing errors of coherence within the semiotic construction of the target text‟.

Subtitles as 'vulnerable translation' At the time of writing, even the most recent addition to literature feels it necessary to justify the object of study as translation - „we believe ... that the battle has now been won with regard to the nature of these practices‟ - and locate subtitling as „one of the most thriving areas within the wider discipline of translation studies‟.

Anthony Pym‟s The Moving Text: Localization, Translation and Distribution, partly a reworking of his earlier Translation and Text Transfer, is a major contribution to the theoretical discussion.