Call for Papers TEXTUS n. 1 – 2021 – LANGUAGE ISSUE

Call for Papers TEXTUS n. 1 – 2021 – LANGUAGE ISSUE

English in Audiovisual Translation Research: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives

Editors: Maria Pavesi (Università di Pavia), Serenella Zanotti (Università Roma Tre), Frederic Chaume (Universitat Jaume I) Copy editor: Denise Filmer (Università di Pisa)

Research enquiry on audiovisual translation is booming. Not only has it broadened its scope by embracing both traditional and novel modalities of screen transfer – dubbing, subtitling, audio description, transcreation, etc., but has also highlighted end-users’ responses and viewpoints together with professional and amateur translators’ proactivity. Plural and often diverging approaches to the description and evaluation of translation practices have emerged, including descriptive translation studies, conversational analysis, cross-cultural pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, archival studies, reception studies, gender studies. The investigation of audiovisual translations has also achieved greater depth as researchers have aptly engaged with the sociolinguistic, multimodal, cognitive, ideological and dynamic dimensions of multimodal texts, relying in turn on empirical, corpus-based and experimental approaches. The ensuing theoretical and methodological eclecticism, however, requires robustness and analytical rigour to avert approximation and achieve valid and reliable results. Within this research galore, English as both a pluricentric language and a constellation of cultures, holds a matchless position. Be it a threat to autochthonous linguacultures, the carrier of morphosyntactic, lexical, phraseological and sociopragmatic templates or a vigorous tool for universalism, English through and on screens is involved in highly influential and yet under-investigated contact situations.

To make sense of this complexity, the present issue of Textus examines audiovisual translation from the two complementary perspectives of synchrony and diachrony, with English and the Italian scene as the common denominators. Several questions are currently at stake in the description and explanation of the products of audiovisual modalities. The representational and non-representational functions of the spoken word in its multimodal context need to be tackled cross-linguistically, with special reference to verbal artistry and creativity, (im)politeness, emotionality and conflict, multilingualism and the orchestration of different language varieties, from descriptive and ideological standpoints. Orality or imitation still occupy central stage in research on the language of audiovisual translation, “given that fiction has a mimetic dimension in the broad sense of referring back somehow to our understanding of reality and commenting on it” (Delabastita 2019: 190); hence the criticality of linguistic and multimodal transcription as the preamble for the analysis of all language levels. Audience design and audience reception must also be put into the picture as they foreground the interpersonal and social functions of multimodal texts.

The history of audiovisual translation is itself an expanding field of enquiry, which seeks to understand translation’s implications for the production, circulation, consumption and reception of audiovisual media. Recent work emphasises the need to put translation practices in their historical context and study how translation norms and linguistic conventions have evolved over time. As O’Sullivan and Cornu (2019a: 4) point out, “there is a necessity to historicise how we look at audiovisual translation, whose diachronic dimension has been almost totally neglected to date”. If studies based on archival documentation are still limited, the potential for research in this area is enormous, as primary sources enable the researcher to 2 approach audiovisual translation as both product and process, making it possible to explore decision-making processes and provide evidence of the factors that influence the shaping of translated audiovisuals. As the main objective of this issue is to offer a complex overview of the products, processes and practices that derive from or are implicated in the transfer of English multimodal texts in Italy, we encourage submissions that critically engage with the above-mentioned perspectives provided they offer a significant and robust theoretical, descriptive or experimental contribution to the enquiry at hand. Possible topics to be addressed by looking at a specific modality or more modalities of audiovisual translation may hence include:

§ Fictional orality and linguistic representations

§ The development and analysis of spoken/written and multimodal corpora (synchronic and diachronic) of audiovisual translations

§ Multimodal textualities and their translation, enhanced localisation and transcreation

§ Transcription processes and products

§ Creativity and innovations in dialogue and the verbal and non-verbal interface

§ Geographical, social, and stylistic variation across time and language borders

§ Ideology in linguistic and translational choices

§ Multilingualism and translanguaging

§ Borrowing, language transfer and linguacultural hybridisation

§ Cross-cultural pragmatics and intercultural mediation

ù§ End-users’ reception and production

§ Re-translations within and across modalities

§ Audiovisual translation history

§ Archival methods and process research

Please send an abstract of 500 words max. to Maria Pavesi (mariagabriella.pavesi@unipv.it), Serenella Zanotti (serenella.zanotti@uniroma3.it) and Frederic Chaume (chaume@uji.es). References Delabastita, Dirk (2019).

Fictional representation. In Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (eds.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Third Edition. London/New York: Routledge: 189-195. O’Sullivan, Carol and Jean-François Cornu (2019). Introduction. Film History Meets Translation History: The Lure of the Archive. In Carol O’Sullivan and Jean-François Cornu (eds.), The Translation of Films 1900-1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1-23.

IMPORTANT DATES Abstract submission deadline: 28 February 2020 Notification of acceptance: 31 March 2020 Preliminary papers to the editors: 30 June 2020 Revised peer-reviewed papers to the editors: 20 December 2020 Final versions from the editors to the publisher: 30 January 2021