Lecture on dubbing, London, Wednesday 10 February

For those of you who are in or around London and interested in audiovisual translation, there's a very eminent speaker giving a lecture at Imperial on Wednesday:

Date: Wednesday, 10 February 2010
Time: 5-6 pm
Room: Huxley Building, Room 144

Dr. Frederic Chaume - Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain

'An Introduction to Dubbing in Europe: Professional Conventions'

Whereas new technologies seem to favour globalisation in many areas of translation, dubbing shows a reluctance to embrace this trend of globalisation. Translation memories are now used to make translation easier and faster all over the world. In the area of audiovisual translation, new subtitling software has been developed, which is now widely used among both practitioners and companies. Also in subtitling, most microtextual practices (line segmentation, subtitle segmentation, typographical usages, synthesis of information, etc.) are followed by the majority of professionals. But dubbing seems to refuse to bend to homogenisation. Perhaps due to notions of nationalism and singularity attached to this concept, dubbing still shows different macro- and microtextual practices in the European countries in which it is the most popular type of audiovisual translation.

This talk introduces audiovisual translation and dubbing and also examines four different dubbing practices at a microtextual level -those carried out in Germany, Italy, Spain and France. Before considering new failed attempts to globalise this practice, and also some major advances brought by new technologies, the paper focuses on the differences in layout, take segmentation and dialogue writing in these four countries. These differences show that dubbing practices are still very conservative, and resistant to change and homogenisation (Linguistica Antverpiensia, 6/2007, pp. 203-207)

Dr. Frederic Chaume is a Professor of Audiovisual Translation at the Universitat Jaume I (Castelló, Spain), where he teaches audiovisual translation theory, dubbing and subtitling. He has twenty years' experience in the audiovisual translation industry. He is author of the books Doblatge i subtitulació per a la TV (Barcelona: Eumo, 2003), Cine y Traducción (Madrid: Cátedra, 2004), Teories Actuals de la Traducció (forthcoming, Bromera) and Audiovisual Translation: Dubbing (St. Jerome, in preparation).

For a complete list of 2009-2010 seminars at Imperial (some really good speakers) see: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/humanities/translationgroup/guestspeakers