Audiovisual translation (AVT) makes media content accessible to all types of viewers by removing linguistic and sensory barriers through interlingual, intralingual or intersemiotic translation. Regarded as an “interdiscipline” (Díaz Cintas and Neves 2015: 2) due to its obvious connection to other analogous disciplines such as film studies, linguistics or cultural studies, AVT has become “one of the most vibrant and vigorous fields within Translation Studies” (Díaz Cintas and Anderman 2009: 8) thanks to the wealth of publications,1 international conferences and dedicated workshops and events that have definitely and decisively propelled the field from the periphery to centre stage (Díaz Cintas and Neves 2015). The coming of age of AVT has run parallel to the impact of digital technology on the production and consumption of audiovisual material, in which translation occupies a central role (Chaume 2018). New developments have given viewers total control over the audiovisual content they watch, deciding when, where and how to consume audiovisual products, switching freely from one language to another and between different AVT modes, and becoming (inter)active participants in the media landscape by sharing, modifying and customising content. Fast-changing technological methods, along with the “empowerment of end users” (Di Giovanni and Gambier 2018: viii), certainly raise interesting possibilities and bring real challenges to translation from the point of view of observation and experimental research.
One of the most widespread and long-standing interlingual modalities within AVT is dubbing, a form of revoicing2 where the original soundtrack is substituted with a new aural track recorded in the target language. The source script is firstly translated, then adjusted and finally voiced in the dubbing studio . The more coherent and cohesive each one of these tasks is, the more unnoticed the linguistic and cultural switch goes for the target audience. The need to conceal every trace of the original aural text has led to the conception that “with dubbing the art is to hide the art” (Kilborn 1993: 645). Perhaps as a direct reflection of this account, dubbing has lacked recognition and visibility from both an academic and professional perspective for many years now. Even though interest in dubbing develops at a slow pace and “remains stubbornly low” (Díaz Cintas 2015: xiii), especially if compared with other flourishing AVT modes such as subtitling/captioning, promising paths have recently been followed in terms of research and practice, particularly within dubbing countries (Di Giovanni 2018). Considerable strides, for instance, have been made in reception-centred research, where several authors have started to explore how dubbing can shape the audiences’ viewing experience and their perception to dubbed content (see Perego et al. 2015, 2016, 2018; Matamala et al. 2017; Ameri and Khoshsaligheh 2018; Ameri et al. 2018; Di Giovanni 2018). Other dominant dubbing-related topics that seem to have resurged over the past few years are censorial and ideological works, including taboo language, politics, race, age, gender, gayspeak and self-censorship (see Ranzato 2012, 2015, 2017; Parini 2014; Mereu 2016a, b; Sandrelli 2016; Zanotti 2016; Giampieri 2017, 2018; Martínez Sierra 2017; Díaz Cintas 2018). The dubbing of multilingual versions has also gained ground in academia (see De Bonis 2014; De Higes-Andino 2014; Díaz Cintas 2014; Heiss 2014; Voellmer and Zabalbeascoa 2014; Zabalbeascoa and Corrius 2014; Zabalbeascoa and Voellmer 2014; Monti 2016; Dore 2019; Magazzù 2019) and other groundbreaking studies such as non-professional dubbing or fandubbing (Chaume 2013; Nord et al. 2015; Baños 2019a), fundubbing or parodic dubbing (Baños 2019a, b), redubs (Zanotti 2015; Di Giovanni 2017; Di Giovanni and Zanotti 2019), dubbing of videogames (Bernal-Merino 2014; Méndez 2015; Mejías-Climent 2018), archival research (Zanotti 2019a, b), eye-tracking experimental research (Di Giovanni and Romero-Fresco 2019; Romero-Fresco 2020) and first steps in the integration of dubbing into the filmmaking process (Sánchez-Mompeán 2019a) are now breaking through in the current audiovisual landscape. All these lines, which include transgressive and creative forms of audiovisual material, draw a clear picture of how this research field is evolving and foretell a promising future ahead.
Dubbing has been categorised as a type of isosemiotic translation (Gottlieb 2005), which means that the information contained in both the original and dubbed versions is transmitted through the same semiotic channel. Transferring the semiotic load from one language into another requires synchrony between the source text (ST) and the target text (TT) at different levels: verbal auditory (dialogues), non-verbal3 auditory (prosodic, paralinguistic as well as extra- or non-linguistic signs and soundtrack) and non-verbal visual (images). The specificity of this audiovisual mode, which “unlike narrative, is ultimately produced in the audio-oral medium and, unlike theatre, is irreversibly bound to a fixed, represented context” (Freddi and Pavesi 2009: 1), and the difficulties it poses for translation have always sparked scholarly interest, bringing both the language of dubbing and linguistic approaches into the core of academic research. Over the past few years, special attention has been placed on the translation of demonstratives, interrogatives, discourse markers, interjections, adverbial intensifiers, phrasal verbs or semantic loans, amongst others (see Baños 2013; Valentini 2013; Freddi and Malagori 2014; Ghia 2014; Minutella and Pulcini 2014; Calvo 2015; Minutella 2015; Pavesi 2015, 2016; Zamora and Alessandro 2016) and different correlations have been observed between the language used in translated and non-translated dialogue. As explained by Pavesi (2013: 104), the dubbed version is characterised by the combined presence of linguistic units giving the impression of spontaneity, labelled as “privileged carriers of orality”, and features that relate dubbed speech directly to film language. The alignment between translated dialogue and naturally occurring conversation, however, has only been established on the verbal side, that is, strictly on the basis of what characters say. The non-verbal dimension of speech, paramount in dubbing by virtue of its oral nature and yet very often relegated to the sidelines (Pérez-González 2014; Bruti and Zanotti 2017), is still awaiting further investigation.
To bridge this long-standing gap the present book extends the scope of analysis beyond the verbal by bringing the way characters say what they say into the limelight. This approach is materialised in the fruitful intersection between two core disciplines, namely AVT and linguistics, or more specifically, dubbing and prosody, thus building an interface that, in Zanotti and Ranzato’s (2019: 174) view, represents “a positive cross-contamination of disciplines”. How we say what we say is as important as what we actually say and very often the non-verbal accompaniment holds the key to deciphering or understanding correctly the verbal content of utterances (Prieto and Rigau 2007). Verbal and non-verbal input can reinforce each other or contradict each other. Within the non-verbal auditory channel, prosodic information is an intrinsic component of languages in spoken discourse that carries attitudinal, syntactic or pragmatic meaning, facilitates both expression and comprehension, and enriches the verbal message. In an AVT mode such as dubbing, these features become especially relevant to and exert a considerable impact on the different...