Proceedings - Translation Concepts

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MuTra 2006 – Audiovisual Translation Scenarios: Conference Proceedings Minako O’Hagan process via Babelfish can be analyzed in terms of TMC as follows: the sender of the message creates some given content, often a website, and the receiver types in the URL of the website in Babelfish to obtain a translation. After a few seconds the translated website is returned to the receiver. In this case, the whole translation process takes place through activating the MT site, which automatically transmits the source text on the Internet to the MT engine, and transmitting the target text back to the receiver, all in one seamless session. The translation can be stored by the receiver or discarded soon after, depending on its purpose. In this way, the analysis of how the text is processed, transmitted and stored can highlight the role played by technology. This is just one approach to elicit how the message moves between the sender and the receiver mediated by technology. The area of TS study covering technology aids belongs to the applied branch within the system of TS theories as mapped by Holms (1899/2000). While this map has been useful in presenting the whole spectrum of TS, it may need to allow for the fact that some fundamental premises of translation are changing because of technology, as the concept of teletranslation attempts to illustrate. The impact of technological developments is multi-fold, affecting not only the tools employed for translation and background research, but also the nature of the content for translation. When the situation is considered from this perspective, the changing environments are likely to cause a drastic shift on basic assumptions about translation which were primarily made based on print form. This in turn supports the argument that the treatment of technological impact on translation should not be of a secondary nature. Current translation theories and associated theoretical frameworks do not seem to provide a useful approach to make sense of the changes taking place in the new paradigm of translation due mainly to technological changes. Munday (2001: 190) briefly discusses the significant impact of technology on translation but stops short of suggesting a new approach to account for this new factor. Such shortcomings are reflected in the lack of theorization of practices such as localization, and the time lag between theory and practice is worsened by the continuous development of new products, in turn introducing new translation practices into the industry. This clearly points to the need for translation research to allow for a technology-focus. In the search for a new approach to translation research, one theoretical tool which looks promising in the area of games localization is affordance theory, originally proposed by Gibson (1979) in the field of human perception, which is now largely applied to examine the nature of human-machine interface and interactivity. The theory focuses on human perception, which recognizes the affordance properties of different objects in the environment which induce an action by a human actor. For example, a door knob affords opening by the human who sees the object, perceives the function of the knob and turns it. Games design builds on such properties to get the player to take certain actions which the game designer wants him/her to perform. Top-selling Japanese videogames are considered to be particularly superior in terms of affordance (Masuyama 2001: 132), providing superior interactive features between the game and the player. Affordance theory can be used to analyze the relationship between the game and the player in different linguistic and cultural contexts. This line of investigation may be useful in examining specific dimensions of translation imposed when localizing Japanese videogames. Theories such as this help to address the significant new characteristic of the three-dimensional game world, which differs from the linear textual world for which the translation practice has traditionally been designed. As discussed earlier, the overall objective for games localization lies in conveying a sense of the pleasure to be gained from the game. To this end, games localization sometimes involves extensive transformations. Adaptation may involve not only textual elements, such as names of characters, but also non-textual aspects, such as facial features of characters, objects, settings, etc. Affordance theories can then be applied to the overall localization and translation strategies to make the player perform certain intended actions. For example, certain actions on the part of the player can be induced more readily by applying the concept 106
MuTra 2006 – Audiovisual Translation Scenarios: Conference Proceedings Minako O’Hagan of affordance which may differ from culture to culture, affecting both the design of the object and textual components. These concepts in turn can be tested to explore how strategies guided by affordance considerations as reflected in translation and localization may impact on the intended user of the localized game. Such experiments may benefit from the use of tools such as an eye tracker to detect the scan path, fixations etc in relation to the object in question. In this way, an approach to games localization from the design and the reception perspectives can be combined with affordance theory considerations. The affordance theory can also be applied to efforts to understand the relationship between the translation tool and the translator such as TM or MT whereby eliciting the role of the tool as an object in the translation process and its outcome. Given the increasing degree of multitasking promoted by certain translation tools such as TM, such a research direction may prove fruitful into identifying shortcomings and advantages of these tools employed in translation tasks. The emergence of new types of content to be translated, involving new translation tools gives rise to an interdisciplinary approach. The discipline of translation has traditionally borrowed concepts from other fields such as linguistics. Although the recent trend in TS has been to move away from linguistics, the theoretical framework that seems productive in the area of audiovisual translation is Fillmore’s (1977) scenes-and-frames semantics, previously explored in the context of translation by Vermeer (1992). This framework was more recently discussed in O’Hagan & Ashworth (2002: 151) and also in connection with visualization in translation by Kussmaul (2004). It allows consideration of the proximity between the image (scenes) evoked by the translator upon reading the source text and that intended by the originator of the source on the one hand, and how that the difference affects the resultant translation (frames) on the other. The closer the scenes evoked by the originator and the translator, the better the translation outcome can be, although the translator can still get the wrong frame based on the right scenes. In the case of audiovisual translation, the presence of actual scenes on screen fills in the gap between the scenes evoked by the translator and that by the originator, and in fact the scenes and frames could work in a reverse direction for the translator. In a standard workflow, a subtitler will get the visual and audio (textual) cues together, so the scenes can be taken as given. However, with the flexibility provided by the new media such as videogames, unlike screen translation, games localization sometimes involves the manipulation of scenes in the form of screen representations to adapt the images on screen to suit the target market (O’Hagan & Mangiron 2004); in such instances translators’ mental images (scenes) may be used to manipulate the original scenes provided. However, these decisions will be influenced further by the consideration of the game play and the design of the game as a whole. In addressing cases such as above, the application of the scenes-and-frames semantics could facilitate an understanding of the translation decision and an explanation of translation strategies. This approach also may be useful in analyzing the subtitles translated without the film being seen by the translator, as happens in actual practice. Such research may be able to provide useful guidelines in suggesting optimal work procedures when working with new computer tools and under new market conditions. These are just a few preliminary suggestions which require further exploration to determine which line of investigation will point to the fruitful direction in to order to address a range of newly emerging translation content types. 5 Conclusion: Futurama This paper set out to argue that the discipline of TS needs to recognize the significant impact of technology in translation, using the concept of teletranslation as a starting point. The paper presented videogames and film titles on DVDs as instances of emerging translation content. These relatively new practices are in turn introducing new ways of translating and new 107
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Marie Curie EU High Level Scientifi
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Part I: Multiling
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3 Marked Structures MuTra 2006 - Au
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Proceedings - Translation Concepts

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