Audiovisual Translation Studies: Development and Challenges — An Interview with Professor Yves Gambier

Ping DENG

Beijing Foreign Studies University / China University of Petroleum (Beijing)

Yves GAMBIER

Turku University

Abstract

Keywords: audiovisual translation (AVT) studies, ESIST, technology, cognition

At the invitation of the Center for Translation Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University during October and November 2017, Yves Gambier taught a short course on Translation Studies and gave a few PhD seminars and public lectures. One of his lectures focused specifically on Audiovisual Translation Studies. He discussed the rapid development of the discipline and current challenges for the industry. This interview with Professor Gambier discusses these issues in details. The following is a transcription of the interview.

Ping:Thank you, Prof. Gambier for agreeing to this interview. I am particularly interested in Audiovisual Translation. You are a well-established scholar in Translation Studies with a wide range of research interests. Could I ask how you came to be interested in audiovisual translation?

Prof. Gambier:Well, by practice. And also, at the beginning of 1990s when I worked for the public TV channel in Finland. I mean, within the association of translators, there were very few audiovisual translators, but there was one woman who was very active and she was getting old and then she said, “Why don’t you take over?” Maybe she realized I was quite willing to commit myself to do something and then she knew I was also working at university, so she said, “Why don’t you do something that we know will be more about translation studies or audiovisual translation and so on?” There were then very few articles, so I did not know exactly what to do. She was pushing me. Then came 1995, the year of the hundred years of cinema and I did something. I didn’t know why but I did it anyway. I knew there would be some celebrations in the Council of Europe and in UNESCO, but I realized there would be nothing about language and translations. So, I wrote a letter to the two institutions: “It will be a pity if you celebrate the 100 years and nothing is said about translation”. And of course, I did not expect an answer. But they answered me, and they invited me to come to Strasbourg, because the Council of Europe is in Strasbourg, and discussed a kind of programme, say what you can do and things like that. So, I was suddenly challenged because I didn’t believe, first of all, they would answer me and then they would propose something. So, I went to Strasbourg, and there were quite official people there. I was quite young at that time. I suggested the organization of some kind of conference to talk about audiovisual translation… They replied: “Go ahead, we will help you!” So, in fact, I was really in the front row; there were very few people I could contact because there was no research. But little by little, I found enough people and we organized a conference in Strasbourg in the premises of the Council of Europe, very official and with the support of UNESCO. So, we got the money to invite people, and to organize things. That was December 1995. Participants came from Romania, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, mainly from Europe of course. And also, I got the support from the International Federation of Translators (FIT); the chairperson at that time, Jean François Joly, came and opened the conference. So again, very official, supported by FIT, by the Council of Europe and UNESCO. People prepared quite well and most of the things at that time people talked about were about what they did. I mean we had no real scientific papers. We also got a long panel discussion where we argued about the kind of research we could carry out, where we could go from here, how, what kind of avenues we could open. That was very rich, very stimulating; we had a very fruitful discussion and from that, everything went! So, you see, sometimes you have to be naïve, or, I don’t know, believe in your lucky star. Even if you think it was partly out of the blue, very ambitious or whatever. But sometimes you have to do this kind of thing and it works. We published a little booklet from this in 1996, under the auspices of FIT. I think that was the first stone for Audiovisual Translation Studies.

Ping:Would you say that your audiovisual translation research began from your practice when you were working for the TV stations?

Prof. Gambier:Yes, but not only working, but also discussing with all the people who were quite interesting, because don’t forget at that time there was no training. The technology was quite heavy. It was not what we know today about digital technology. You had to work in a very fragmented way, and you could not do anything on the screen. We had no software for subtitling, the division of labour was quite complicated, not easy work. How could we improve our work? There was a need for discussing what and how you are doing, is it the best way, and also at that time the number of TV channels was growing. They were using works (subtitles) we had been doing without our permission. We were losing royalties. Two things were challenged: the working conditions and legal matters (copyrights). We understood that we needed to work together and think a little bit more.

Ping:So, this was a very good start. How did you come up with the idea of starting the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (ESIST)?

Prof. Gambier:Yes, it was 1996 or 1997. With some of the people who were attending the conference. I don’t know why, but I think all the people there, maybe about a hundred people or so, I don’t remember exactly, were all very strongly motivated, by their practice, their experience, and also willing to do some research to start to better understand what we were doing. I think it was 1996 or 1997 we started. The association was a very small one; it was good that we decided right at the beginning that we had to work as a network. I think that was a good way to do things. We learned from each other. We learned that there were different types of practice here and there, and we had to understand about the different modalities, why it is so here and why it is so there, even if we were referring mainly to subtitling, how to compare the different practices and so on. Most of the people were trying to improve the situation. I will not say they were doing research but thinking about work. On the other hand, I was gathering ideas, suggestions, analyses, and we published a book in 1997, in France. I think that was one of the first books on audiovisual translation. But again, all these people were practitioners and also academics, so they knew what they were talking about, not only pure speculation, they tried to describe what they were doing. Then things went very fast: the number of papers and the number of conferences increased, very fast. So it was maybe the right time to do something. The conference in Strasbourg was the right thing at the right time.

Ping:Thank you. Then what achievements has ESIST made up to now?

Prof. Gambier:Well, it remains a very small association. We have mainly committed or activist members. I don’t know what to call them but committed scholars. I think it’s now taking a new journey in a way. The members knew each other and were active in different situations, you know, in their country or TV channels whatever. Sometimes maybe more active on the European level. But we were not really coordinating on what we were doing, we knew what we were doing, what the others were doing and so on. The group was small. Some people started to work together. As such, ESIST did not do very much. However, in 2000 or so, we did conduct a large survey about subtitles in more than 40 TV channels in Europe and drafted a kind of standard on subtitling/subtitles. Today ESIST is trying to launch a new journal online from the next year; in May (2018) there will be the first issue. It will be online. That will be the first journal dedicated to audiovisual translation. And in parallel, a new bi-annual conference was launched in 1996, held in Berlin. Quite a small conference at the beginning, but then every two years, and it still exists today, more than twenty years after! After Strasbourg…was Berlin. Now we have about four hundred, five hundred participants, both practitioners and academics. And my new dream is to include more people from outside of Europe. Some participants from Australia and from South Africa have always been present, but Asia has always been far away. I hope China will be more involved in the future there.

Ping:It means that scholars from other countries or regions outside Europe are also welcome to join this organization?

Prof. Gambier:They can do what they want. I don’t think they will have to join ESIST, but I think the Berlin conference is a good meeting point where we can exchange… ESIST is, I think, one way to keep together to be sure that we can resist, because don’t forget at the beginning, a lot of people did not believe in what we were doing. So, it was one way to be able to resist against people who were against audiovisual translation. I think different associations can be created in different parts of the world. One is coming to China. I know for instance some people in South America have tried very hard to set up something, but they were so different from each other that it did not work. But I think here for instance, in China, you have many more people, and they need to do something towards the authorities and the industry. In Africa, there is no association, but the interest is getting bigger because technology is impacting daily life; language diversity is a challenge for public communication.

Ping:You have just mentioned that there is a new journal about audiovisual translation coming up next year by ESIST. What is the name of that journal? Who is the publisher of it? Is it peer-reviewed?

Prof. Gambier:JAT,Journal of Audiovisual Translation. I don’t know if it will remain the official name; that’s the name we have been using until today. The inaugural issue is planned for May or June 2018. The journal will be online. At first, we will try online, which is quite in line with what we are doing, but later on, let’s see how it works. I must say I was not in favour of that journal at the beginning not because I’m against audiovisual translation but because I thought that maybe we have too many journals and if we get more specialized journals, then people will focus on their own interests, won’t read anything else about other issues in Translation Studies, with the risk of fragmentation of Translation Studies. So, if you have a new journal starting in 2018 on Cognition and Translation and one of audiovisual translation, so you have already two specialized journals from next year on. Does this mean that people working in cognition will not talk and follow what is going on in audiovisual translation and people who are working in audiovisual translation will not follow what is going on in cognition? “Good” scholars will make bridges between the different research areas in Translation Studies, but you need to have access to the different publications, you need time. Not everybody, not all the libraries can afford to buy or to subscribe to two journals. The risk is that they will subscribe to only one. The young generation may not have an overview of what is going on in Translation Studies. Vitality is a positive sign for a discipline, fragmentation is a risk. JAT is peer-reviewed. There is an internal advisory board and an international scientific board. I think that’s the only way to promote research.

Ping:Thank you, that’s quite informative. I think that nowadays audiovisual translation studies has gone very multi-disciplinary. Di Giovanni et al. (2012)1Di Giovanni, E., Orero, P., & Agost, R. (2012). Introduction to Multidisciplinarity in Audiovisual Translation. In R. Agost, P. Orero, & E. Di Giovanni (Eds.), Multidisciplinarity in Audiovisual Translation. MonTI (4), pp. 9-22.have clarified the concepts of multidisciplinarity, inter-disciplinarity, trans-disciplinarity and stated that audiovisual translation studies should stay multidisciplinary. What is your view on this?

Prof. Gambier:Well, it depends on how we define the disciplinarity, inter- or trans-. I think it’s a question of definition. Multi-disciplinarity (or pluri-disciplinarity) is a little bit disturbing in a way because it means you’re adding disciplines, but there is no connection between them. When you talk about inter-disciplinarity, you believe that there is more mixing, more integration. Now for me, transdisciplinarity means two disciplines are interacting so far that they create a new discipline, a third one, that’s why trans-discipline means to go beyond two disciplines, a kind of merging. And you have many cases, for instance, in all sciences, biology and technology which have given birth to biotechnology, and you have molecular biology which is a new part of biology, but it’s beyond biology, and so on. With transdisciplinarity, at least two disciplines get together, work together, usually to solve a very concrete problem and so far that they create a new discipline. For instance, woman studies; now it’s a field on its own, and maybe that was also the birth of translation studies, in the 1970s, from linguistics, contrastive linguistics, literature, comparative literature. Look, for instance, the Internet or Web Studies today: people come from computing, psychology, design, marketing, etc. They create new fields and you have now PhD programs in these studies. In audiovisual translation, we can work in the interdisciplinarity way. It means we have to talk and work with people from film studies, media studies, psycholinguistics, cognitive studies, and so on. And I think that’s where we are going. A new book is coming out soon (in 2018) onReception Studiesand Audiovisual Translation. You will realize that in the book we refer to psychology, cognition, and also to different kinds of methods developed thanks to tools such as eye-tracker or key-logging software. Those methods and tools do not belong to any exclusive discipline. There is now a Call for Papers for the online journalSpecialized Translation (Jostrans)about cognition and audiovisual translation. The challenge is to find competent scholars able to work on both sides while they have been trained in one discipline only. On the other hand, when you work in an interdisciplinary perspective, you might face the problem of publishing because most of the journals are specialized or even hyper-specialized. That’s one reason why we are creating JAT: we know that some people have got problems to publish articles on audiovisual translation. Some journals in translation reject them because it’s not enough “translation”; and if you try to publish your paper in Psychology, or Psycholinguistics, your article can be rejected because it is not the type of articles they are used to publishing (lack of statistics, use of a different terminology, for instance). A paradox: we do more interdisciplinary research and/but journals are reluctant to edit such work.

Ping:Do you mean that audiovisual translation studies is more interdisciplinary?

Prof. Gambier:Yes, in my opinion, yes. Nothing bad with that.

Ping:You have just mentioned eye-tracking. That is one of the questions I want to ask. Technology nowadays is taking over, it seems, in many disciplines. What are the advantages and disadvantages of technology-oriented research in audiovisual translation, especially like eye-tracking, this kind of advanced technology?

Prof. Gambier:Well, I think with eye-tracking, for instance, you cannot have a big sample of people. You can study maybe five people and still you have a lot of work to study them. So, you study a limited sample. What is the representativeness of that sample? As you know, more and more scholars are only studying students, for practical reasons. But we cannot believe that what they are doing, the way they react or the way they respond is representative of most of the behaviours in our society. We need more diversity. But again, it’s not easy to carry out such eye-tracking research outside and configure the software to each viewer you want to study. That’s one of the strong limitations of eye-tracking. On the other hand, you get a lot of data, and you don’t know how to interpret it. The same applies to psychologists, researchers in marketing or advertising, or any scholar willing to use eye-tracking. We have a lot of data with this kind of device, but we still lack the theoretical or conceptual background to fully understand the data we obtain. And I think this is quite normal when you get a new tool. I think for Translog, the keylogging software, it has been the same, at the beginning: a lot of data and the problem of how to interpret all the data. Now we have learned, after 20-25 years, how to focus on certain objectives and not try to get everything and interpret everything. Today, scholars from different disciplines share in conferences or seminars or Summer Schools what they can do with eye-tracking. For instance, next year (2018) there will be an Asia-Pacific conference on eye-tracking1The Australian Eye-tracking Conference 2018, held on 26 to 28 April 2018. For further information, see https://www.mq.edu.au/about/events/view/the-australian-eye-tracking-conference-2018/.in Australia. So, people from audiovisual translation, from psychology, maybe from medicine will come and talk about their problems. This is a kind of interdisciplinary event; that’s how you make progress. You realize your problems, and share with other disciplines, and then you think together how to solve the problems.

Ping:In the industry of audiovisual translation, there are some new modes coming up, like amateur subtitling and crowdsourcing. They have posed some challenges to the traditional modes, and they have created some new ways to translate, to subtitle. So, will this be the growing point in audiovisual translation studies, the future orientation for development in the research of audiovisual translation?

Prof. Gambier:We have already quite a few publications and studies on those matters, but again, like for any kind of group of people, we have some limitations. We know what amateurs are doing but we don’t know enough who they are. So, in a way, you get something about the end product but you don’t know very much about who are the people at the beginning of the process. I think we need to know more about who they are. Until today it has been difficult to get reliable data from the Internet, for instance. We know there are communities and they are working in a certain way and they challenge certain things, this is quite OK, that’s quite clear. But still we cannot go too far and make some definitive statement about the way they are doing, and don’t forget also this kind of community may change rapidly, the young people are getting older… I’m not so sure that crowdsourcing for amateurs will remain very attractive. Communities disappear and maybe a new community starts again, with a different agenda, a different type of TV series. I don’t know if we could have any kind of continuity if we can learn from all the different kinds of communities before they disappear. In China, there are amateurs, but usually what you can read on them is so..., how should I say, so positive (they are doing so well, they are very active). To what extent can we rely on what they say because what is written is written by people who are a member of the community and they might be blind; they want to promote their own work…. But very surprisingly they hardly talk about censorship, they hardly talk about how they get the films, and what kind of problems they meet. They give a very idealistic view of their own work but that’s why I think we need to get critical distance from what they say. They are very enthusiastic to do what they do but as a scholar, we have to be keeping a kind of distance. Again, I don’t know about the future, in fact, I really don’t know. Technology is fascinating but you must see both sides of it: the positive one and the negative one. A tool is a tool. You can get tired of it. It is the same with a smartphone. In Finland ten years ago, people were like you out here today, walking in the street with their smartphone, nothing existed in the world. And in the classroom, it was the same, nobody was listening to the teachers. But now people, they know what it is, it’s in the pocket and they look around, and they walk like before and so on. So, the boom of a new technology exists for some time, not forever. It’s like everything which is new when you have a new toy when you have a new car, anything you want to or wish to get. After a while, you say, well, a car is just a car, I have been buying ten cars, so nothing is very new now, and you don’t pay attention as before as when you have your first car. That’s human behaviour.

Ping:There are a lot of publications and conferences in audiovisual translation studies. It seems that in recent years, especially within the recent ten years, this discipline has grown very fast. What are the problems and challenges for this discipline and what are the opportunities?

Prof. Gambier:Well, when you say it has been growing fast, I think we have to be clear about what we mean by “growing”. Yes, the number of publications has increased, that’s for sure. But does it mean that the research has grown? I don’t think so. In a way, we have a lot of repeating case studies, more or less about problems on how to translate humour, puns, culture-bound elements, swear words, politeness, etc. You accumulate a certain number of studies, but they are quite similar publications, a lot of repetitions. For instance, most of the studies are done, let’s say, from a national perspective. Italian people are working about dubbing in Italy, and Spaniards are working about Spanish subtitling or dubbing and so on. The risk is that you can create some kind of self-satisfaction or something like that. But we forget that, for instance, media are now international, media groups are international, and TV channels tend to use more and more international formats for their programs. We are blind about internationalization of the industry. It’s the same for movies. I mean, you forget that the thing does exist at the international level, and this aspect of internationalization has not been really taken into account in most of our studies. Yet there are interesting studies, I don’t deny that. But there are quite a lot of topics to be dealt with in audiovisual translation, like for instance, internationalization of the media, the way we use the media today because we are not watching TV, we are not using smartphones or small devices today as we used to watch TV twenty years ago. So, our behaviours have changed. But what does it mean? What has been changed in our watching habits? I think that’s something we have to study. And also, we need to know more about history, again to understand the changes in audiovisual translation. Also, we need more contrastive studies, the way you’re doing in China. What are the differences with our traditions in Europe, for instance? And because of this confrontation, we can learn a lot. Or in Japan, for instance, the used smileys or emoticons in many of their entertainment programs. How do people watch these kinds of things? How do they react? Are they satisfied? We laugh at that because it’s funny in a way, but that’s because we watch them once now and then. But when you watch often these smileys, what does it mean? Do you get tired? Do you understand anything? Or don’t you care anymore? There are different ways and different avenues for the research, because of the diversity of modalities in audiovisual translation and because of the changes over time. Reception is one of the promising directions. We have studied translated outputs, translation process, strategies, but what about viewers, audiences?

Ping:How about the audiovisual translation training programs in Europe, or in Finland, specifically?

Prof. Gambier:Yes, we have had a program in Turku for quite a few years now. And we have gone through changes. At the beginning (end of the 1990s) we were working with practitioners from outside. Now we have a more systematic program. But since the market has changed, and the job market is not so large, we don’t train people every year because we don’t want them to be out of work. So maybe every two or three years we will train them, and we focus mainly on subtitling because it’s the main mode in Finland; we know that we should do a bit more about audio-description, for instance. But you have to start somewhere and there are very few people doing audio description now, or live-subtitling. The programme is changing but too slowly in my opinion. At the university, you cannot just change so rapidly. You have to make a proposal, it has to be accepted by the authorities. You also have to find qualified teachers or trainers. But the students are very keen. Sometimes we have to say, yes, but not this year, next year! For instance, I started now on a new program in Russia, the first one in Russia, and I was a little bit disappointed because a lot of young students wanted to participate, but then the university organized the same kind of selection, the same kind of exam as before which has nothing to do with audiovisual translation. So the students did not try the exam. They felt the exam about linguistics was not relevant. Things can change but not before 2019. In many European countries (in Spain, in Italy, etc.) you have today training programs, but they are often more oriented to research than to practice, for instance, in England where you have quite a few good programs. But they train more researchers than practitioners.

Ping:Do you mean that the training for future practitioners in audiovisual translation should link the industry with academia?

Prof. Gambier:Yes. I think in the 1990s when we gathered people from the conference in Strasbourg and for the first book, all the teachers and trainers were practitioners. But now it seems that the teachers are not always practitioners, and maybe that’s also the way the universities recruit teachers. Now because of the lack of money, it’s very difficult to invite people from outside. On the other hand, the industry has changed, with more multinationals which are less interested to have highly qualified staff. We also have more internship in the programmes. This compensates that, both the lack of money in universities and the tough competition in the job market.

Ping:You were invited to the Beijing Film Festival this April (2017). What did you find out in attending this event? And how do you feel about the film industry and film translation industry in China?

Prof. Gambier:I was there for one week, so I will not make a very strong statement. I did not know very much before about the Chinese film industry. Before I came, I knew that a Chinese company bought the only film distributor in Finland, and I was not very pleased with that. What kind of films would we get then? So, when I was invited I was quite excited. I realized we were talking about the export of Chinese films, in a very traditional way. In my opinion, there are two things to take into consideration if you want to export: first of all, you also have to accept to import because the exchange is an inter-relation. It cannot be one way; one way is what I call “imperialism”. That’s how Hollywood has worked for so many years. They bombarded every country with their own films, but they did not care too much about foreign films. And I don’t think China should do the same. And No. 2, I don’t think foreign people are so keen, as you might be, and you have some reasons for that, to watch classical Chinese films, war films, Kung Fu films… We don’t know your history so far and I don’t think most of the viewers, ready to see Chinese films, are willing to go to movies to see stereotypes. That was in April. Now when I came back in October and November (2017), I got different contacts again and I realized, for instance, you have a lot of different TV series and films about today’s life, about problems in your society, how you deal with them, how are the relationships in the families or between families or the contrast between family values and work life, and all these kinds of things… Things are changing very rapidly everywhere. In April, we were about thirty foreigners, but we not only wanted you to import as well to export, but also to get Chinese films subtitled not only in English - English might be a lingua franca, but it’s not the language of everybody in the world. The translation companies we visited, or the editing company we visited at that time, did not want to hear our concerns. Now, I realize companies are working with more languages. That’s very good. Language diversity is a fact in Africa, in Europe, etc. Working with a very open mind and listening to what people are saying are good points in international relationships.

Ping:Thank you very much for the interview.