Reflecting on Audiovisual Translation in the Third Millennium: Perspectives and Approaches to a Complex Art

This volume intends to reflect on the new trends, perspectives and interdisciplinary connections of Audiovisual Translation Studies in the third millennium, trying to offer a variety of approaches and to find answers to the many questions still to be further explored in the future. Both traditional and more recent forms of AVT have been explored from a linguistic and socio-cultural point of view, in order to illustrate the complexity of the field and the multi-faceted nature of these studies today. As highlighted by many of the contributors, the long-debated question of whether audiovisual translation could indeed be included in the field of Translation Studies is now overcome. Although it still remains a form of 'constrained' translation by its own nature, the translators' linguistic contribution is not over-determined by all the other semiotic codes which are simultaneously producing sense in audiovisual products, but is one of the communicative systems in a multimodal environment. All things considered, the third millennium may well see the advent of an 'audiovisual turn' in Translation Studies, as a result of the budding expansion of the discipline and of its importance both at an academic and professional level. In this mood of renewed confidence, it comes as no surprise that an interdisciplinary perspective - as the one adopted here - seems to be all the more imperative, together with new challenges still waiting to be fully realized.