NEW MEDIA - NEW CONTEXTS NEW TRANSLATOR PROFILES?

8th conference on LANGUAGE TRANSFER in AUDIOVISUAL MEDIA BERLIN, October 6-8, 2010:

Digitisation and the explosion in digital content, social media, cloud computing and new platforms offer growing opportunities for audiovisual production, distribution and localisation. These developments are flanked by diversifying concepts and modes of audiovisual translation (multidimensional translation, all forms of accessibility), consequently blurring distinctions and supposed dichotomies (professional versus amateur, productivity versus quality, subtitling versus dubbing, etc.). Open resources, open markets and open societies are creating new distribution contexts but are also imposing new (working) constraints, which force us to question current training programmes and anticipate future ones. The 8th International Languages and the Media Conference and Exhibition with its focus on language transfer in audiovisual media addresses these challenges with the following twelve themes: 1. Global Content – Local Audiences / Global Audiences – Local Content: globalisation vs. glocalisation, global and local markets, multilingual access, internationalisation (English as lingua franca), consumer choice, supply and demand, power and ideology. 2. Broadcasting and Language Policy: programming, multilingual and multicultural settings, internet broadcasting, legislation, special interest channels, ethnic minorities, lesser-used languages. 3. Social Media: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikis and Co., Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, participatory culture. 4. Crowdsourcing: fansubbing, fandubbing, amateur translation and interpreting, activist networks, “natural” translators and interpreters, community translation, collective intelligence. 5. Technical Documentation and AV Localisation: corporate videos, corporate terminology, TMs, AVT and cloud computing, subtitling, voiceover, dubbing, interpreting, narration, reversioning. 6. Access and Live Entertainment: accessibility and social cohesion, audio description for the blind and the partially sighted, subtitling for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing, surtitles, audio subtitling, sign language interpreting, revoicing, museums, opera, theatre, religious settings, sports and other live events. 7. Games Localisation: interactive software, serious games, online and mobile gaming, dealing with linguistic assets. 8. Tools and Technologies: new software developments, 3D, translation memory systems and computer-assisted tools applied to AVT, machine translation, voice recognition, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, virtual environments, digitisation, on-the-go technology, eye-tracking. 9. Productivity and Re-Usability: quantity vs. quality, revision, redubbing, resubtitling, costs, pivot languages, archiving, metadata, multiple platforms, distribution and exhibition, translators’ rights. 10. Translator Training: academic curricula, translators’ agency, skills and abilities, didactics, undergraduate and postgraduate, work placements/work experience. 11. Audiovisual Literacy: research dissemination, professional ethics, audiovisual genres and translation, audience profiling, reception approaches, multimodality. 12. Language Acquisition: foreign language learning and AVT, mother tongue literacy, lesser taught languages, reading skills.