Luis Perez-Gonzalez
I am Professor of Translation Studies at the Department of Translation and Foreign Languages | www.luisperezgonzalez.org
My research interests fall under four main areas:
:: The Contestation of Key Political and Scientific Concepts in the Digital Sphere
My work in the AHRC-funded project Genealogies of Knowledge: The Evolution and Contestation of Concepts across Time and Space marries my interest in horizontal or deliberative politics with corpus-based translation studies. Drawing on a corpus of Internet discourse in English produced by alternative media and news outlets, I lead a strand of the project exploring how civil society organisations are currently challenging and redefining established meanings and interpretations of key concepts relating to the body politic and to scientific, expert discourse – as radical-democratic projects supersede traditional models of democracy and rationality and their capacity to confer representative authority and canonise knowledge. This 4-year corpus-based project should contribute to raising public awareness of how (re)translation and networked technologies have brought and continue to bring changes to our understanding of key cultural concepts pertaining to these two sets of interconnected concepts.
:: Engaged Subtitling and Citizen Media in the Digital Culture ::
I am interested in the political dimension of amateur subtitling and its contribution to the production and circulation of citizen media content in the digital culture. Informed by cultural studies, affect theory and narrative theory, this strand of my work examines how activist subtitling agencies at the interface between the actual and the digital are able to escape confinement in essentialist categories of identity politics such as social class, race or gender. The premise underpinning this work is that, in post-industrial societies, self-mediation practices such as activist subtitling mirror the ongoing shift from established representation models of democracy towards deliberative forms of governance with the capacity to mobilise fluid radical constituencies and foster the formation of inter-subjectivity through affective flows.
:: Fandom and Audiovisual Translation ::
Since the mid-2000s, amateur subtitling networks have become influential fandom-driven agencies of translation. This participatory (sub)cultural communities, typically referred to as fansubbing groups, have engendered significant tensions over the ownership of consumer-generated media content and threatened the economic and industrial foundations of the audiovisual industry. These ‘prosumption’ communities negotiate and hybridise two conflicting logics of the cultural marketplace: the drive to accrue cultural and symbolic capital in the form of recognition and reputation; and the effort, in some cases, to commoditise the content they produce through their immaterial labour. A number of my publications have sought to gauge the extent to which fansubbing is subverting what had so far been regarded as widely accepted standards of professional mediation/intervention, and the capacity of these alternative mediation conventions to resist and challenge the standardising and domesticating effects of mainstream subtitling practices. My work has also explored the potential of such novel practices to leak out of the boundaries of non-mainstream genres into the domain of mainstream commercial content such as films. By addressing the impact of media convergence, co-creation and immaterial labour on the production and consumption of media content, this body of work has also contributed to re-theorising the place of translation in the globalised media landscape.
:: Discourse, Translation and the Law ::
My doctoral thesis focused on the discursive manifestations of attempted deception in 999 hoax calls, and represented one of the earliest forensic studies of spoken interaction. This work led to the publication of a monograph and a number of papers on the dynamic realisation of genre and discourse modelling in conversation. After completing my thesis, I moved to explore other issues at the interface between language and the law. These included the homogenising effect that globalization is having on courtroom proceedings across legal cultures, as adversarial practices such as trial by jury are adopted in non-adversarial, civil law systems. My publications in this area examine the impact that such changes have had on the performance of translators and courtroom interpreters – given that legal players are often unaware of the pressures that imported Anglo-Saxon practices have on the performance of translators and interpreters trained to work in a non-adversarial environment. More widely, my interest in the study of the interface between language and the law has led me to conduct research into various aspects of legal translator training, including the role that translation technologies play in that process.
Address: Department of Foreign Language and Translation
Universitetet i Agder
Postboks 422
4604 Kristiansand
Norway
My research interests fall under four main areas:
:: The Contestation of Key Political and Scientific Concepts in the Digital Sphere
My work in the AHRC-funded project Genealogies of Knowledge: The Evolution and Contestation of Concepts across Time and Space marries my interest in horizontal or deliberative politics with corpus-based translation studies. Drawing on a corpus of Internet discourse in English produced by alternative media and news outlets, I lead a strand of the project exploring how civil society organisations are currently challenging and redefining established meanings and interpretations of key concepts relating to the body politic and to scientific, expert discourse – as radical-democratic projects supersede traditional models of democracy and rationality and their capacity to confer representative authority and canonise knowledge. This 4-year corpus-based project should contribute to raising public awareness of how (re)translation and networked technologies have brought and continue to bring changes to our understanding of key cultural concepts pertaining to these two sets of interconnected concepts.
:: Engaged Subtitling and Citizen Media in the Digital Culture ::
I am interested in the political dimension of amateur subtitling and its contribution to the production and circulation of citizen media content in the digital culture. Informed by cultural studies, affect theory and narrative theory, this strand of my work examines how activist subtitling agencies at the interface between the actual and the digital are able to escape confinement in essentialist categories of identity politics such as social class, race or gender. The premise underpinning this work is that, in post-industrial societies, self-mediation practices such as activist subtitling mirror the ongoing shift from established representation models of democracy towards deliberative forms of governance with the capacity to mobilise fluid radical constituencies and foster the formation of inter-subjectivity through affective flows.
:: Fandom and Audiovisual Translation ::
Since the mid-2000s, amateur subtitling networks have become influential fandom-driven agencies of translation. This participatory (sub)cultural communities, typically referred to as fansubbing groups, have engendered significant tensions over the ownership of consumer-generated media content and threatened the economic and industrial foundations of the audiovisual industry. These ‘prosumption’ communities negotiate and hybridise two conflicting logics of the cultural marketplace: the drive to accrue cultural and symbolic capital in the form of recognition and reputation; and the effort, in some cases, to commoditise the content they produce through their immaterial labour. A number of my publications have sought to gauge the extent to which fansubbing is subverting what had so far been regarded as widely accepted standards of professional mediation/intervention, and the capacity of these alternative mediation conventions to resist and challenge the standardising and domesticating effects of mainstream subtitling practices. My work has also explored the potential of such novel practices to leak out of the boundaries of non-mainstream genres into the domain of mainstream commercial content such as films. By addressing the impact of media convergence, co-creation and immaterial labour on the production and consumption of media content, this body of work has also contributed to re-theorising the place of translation in the globalised media landscape.
:: Discourse, Translation and the Law ::
My doctoral thesis focused on the discursive manifestations of attempted deception in 999 hoax calls, and represented one of the earliest forensic studies of spoken interaction. This work led to the publication of a monograph and a number of papers on the dynamic realisation of genre and discourse modelling in conversation. After completing my thesis, I moved to explore other issues at the interface between language and the law. These included the homogenising effect that globalization is having on courtroom proceedings across legal cultures, as adversarial practices such as trial by jury are adopted in non-adversarial, civil law systems. My publications in this area examine the impact that such changes have had on the performance of translators and courtroom interpreters – given that legal players are often unaware of the pressures that imported Anglo-Saxon practices have on the performance of translators and interpreters trained to work in a non-adversarial environment. More widely, my interest in the study of the interface between language and the law has led me to conduct research into various aspects of legal translator training, including the role that translation technologies play in that process.
Address: Department of Foreign Language and Translation
Universitetet i Agder
Postboks 422
4604 Kristiansand
Norway
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The book first traces the development and evolution of audiovisual translation, exploring how the homogenizing mediation practices imposed by the industry during the mass media era are being challenged by interventionist forms of translation in the era of the digital culture.
The evolving conceptual network that underpin this area of study, the key translation models driving the theorization of this activity and the most productive methodological approaches to the study of audiovisual translation are then surveyed, critiqued and illustrated in a systematic, easy-to-follow manner. Multimodal theory and self-mediation studies receive particular attention as the most influential theoretical frameworks that will drive audiovisual translation research in years to come. Students and early career scholars are provided with comprehensive guidance to design and undertake audiovisual translation research projects.
Each chapter features chapter summaries, introductory videos, authentic examples, break out boxes, reading suggestions and follow‐up questions for further study. A companion website provides readers with access to additional resources on each of the topics covered in this book.
Audiovisual Translation is the definitive guide to the research models and methodological approaches that are enabling and will continue to drive advances in this fast-developing area of study.
• The book can serve as a textbook for use at MA level but also constitutes a ‘first port‐of‐call’ reference on aspects of theoretical inquiry.
• The book explores new audiovisual translation genres and practices in contemporary networked societies, covering topics and issues not previously discussed in the audiovisual translation literature.
• The book includes a whole chapter offering methodological direction to readers conducting their own research at MA at doctoral level.
• The follow-up questions for discussion in all chapters provide abundant ideas for extended postgraduate essays, various types of dissertation, and (post)doctoral level research projects.
Keywords: translation studies, social perspectives on context, cognitive perspectives on context, static perspectives on context, dynamic perspectives on context, neutral perspectives on context, power-sensitive perspectives on context
The starting premise of this chapter is that academic interest in non-verbal semiotic resources and their role in processes of interlingual and intercultural transfer is unevenly spread across different scholarly strands within the discipline. As far as the breadth of this research agenda is concerned, images appear to be the only non-linguistic meaning-making signs showing an increasingly recognised potential to inform research in translation studies. Dialogue interpreting, audiovisual and drama translation, to give but a few examples, still lack the theoretical and methodological concepts and tools to systematically analyse semiotic resources such as the gestures and facial expressions accentuating face-to-face conversation; the choices of fonts, colours and patterns of textual-visual interaction in printed advertisements; or the use of music and lighting in the staging of a drama production, respectively.
This paper surveys ongoing research on how different semiotic resources shape translational behaviour in different communicative contexts, including but not limited to the interaction between speech and image in printed media and motion pictures; the modelling of composite semiotic systems, such as movement, gestures and gaze; the representation of identities and ideologies using non-verbal resources; and the conceptualisation of space, interpersonal perspective and salience in a range of settings, such as museums. The paper then moves on to explore how insights imported from multimodal theory, as developed in the field of systemic functional linguistics and social semiotics, may help translation and interpreting scholars to gain new insights into old data. Key notions like ‘multimodal’, ‘multimedial’, ‘mode’, ‘modality’, ‘sub-mode’ and ‘medial realisation’ are introduced and explored in some detail.
The contribution of multimodal insights to research in translation studies are also gauged in relation to new data and their contexts of production, as illustrated by the way in which different modes function semiotically when combined in the modern discourse worlds afforded by the computer and the Internet. In these ‘new media’, information is proliferating in forms which push our methods of sharing it effectively; the shape of discourse communities using, assessing and circulating translations is changing with the changing shape of texts; ideological currents engaging with the interpretation of translations are flowing beyond existing linguistic means of analysis and critique; and new amateur phenomena, mainly fandom and political activism, are increasingly appropriating translation and interpreting as a means to effect social change.
The final section (before the conclusion) considers the methodological implications of multimodal research in translation and interpreting studies, with particular emphasis on new tools like multimodal transcriptions and multimodal corpora.
""
The book first traces the development and evolution of audiovisual translation, exploring how the homogenizing mediation practices imposed by the industry during the mass media era are being challenged by interventionist forms of translation in the era of the digital culture.
The evolving conceptual network that underpin this area of study, the key translation models driving the theorization of this activity and the most productive methodological approaches to the study of audiovisual translation are then surveyed, critiqued and illustrated in a systematic, easy-to-follow manner. Multimodal theory and self-mediation studies receive particular attention as the most influential theoretical frameworks that will drive audiovisual translation research in years to come. Students and early career scholars are provided with comprehensive guidance to design and undertake audiovisual translation research projects.
Each chapter features chapter summaries, introductory videos, authentic examples, break out boxes, reading suggestions and follow‐up questions for further study. A companion website provides readers with access to additional resources on each of the topics covered in this book.
Audiovisual Translation is the definitive guide to the research models and methodological approaches that are enabling and will continue to drive advances in this fast-developing area of study.
• The book can serve as a textbook for use at MA level but also constitutes a ‘first port‐of‐call’ reference on aspects of theoretical inquiry.
• The book explores new audiovisual translation genres and practices in contemporary networked societies, covering topics and issues not previously discussed in the audiovisual translation literature.
• The book includes a whole chapter offering methodological direction to readers conducting their own research at MA at doctoral level.
• The follow-up questions for discussion in all chapters provide abundant ideas for extended postgraduate essays, various types of dissertation, and (post)doctoral level research projects.
Keywords: translation studies, social perspectives on context, cognitive perspectives on context, static perspectives on context, dynamic perspectives on context, neutral perspectives on context, power-sensitive perspectives on context
The starting premise of this chapter is that academic interest in non-verbal semiotic resources and their role in processes of interlingual and intercultural transfer is unevenly spread across different scholarly strands within the discipline. As far as the breadth of this research agenda is concerned, images appear to be the only non-linguistic meaning-making signs showing an increasingly recognised potential to inform research in translation studies. Dialogue interpreting, audiovisual and drama translation, to give but a few examples, still lack the theoretical and methodological concepts and tools to systematically analyse semiotic resources such as the gestures and facial expressions accentuating face-to-face conversation; the choices of fonts, colours and patterns of textual-visual interaction in printed advertisements; or the use of music and lighting in the staging of a drama production, respectively.
This paper surveys ongoing research on how different semiotic resources shape translational behaviour in different communicative contexts, including but not limited to the interaction between speech and image in printed media and motion pictures; the modelling of composite semiotic systems, such as movement, gestures and gaze; the representation of identities and ideologies using non-verbal resources; and the conceptualisation of space, interpersonal perspective and salience in a range of settings, such as museums. The paper then moves on to explore how insights imported from multimodal theory, as developed in the field of systemic functional linguistics and social semiotics, may help translation and interpreting scholars to gain new insights into old data. Key notions like ‘multimodal’, ‘multimedial’, ‘mode’, ‘modality’, ‘sub-mode’ and ‘medial realisation’ are introduced and explored in some detail.
The contribution of multimodal insights to research in translation studies are also gauged in relation to new data and their contexts of production, as illustrated by the way in which different modes function semiotically when combined in the modern discourse worlds afforded by the computer and the Internet. In these ‘new media’, information is proliferating in forms which push our methods of sharing it effectively; the shape of discourse communities using, assessing and circulating translations is changing with the changing shape of texts; ideological currents engaging with the interpretation of translations are flowing beyond existing linguistic means of analysis and critique; and new amateur phenomena, mainly fandom and political activism, are increasingly appropriating translation and interpreting as a means to effect social change.
The final section (before the conclusion) considers the methodological implications of multimodal research in translation and interpreting studies, with particular emphasis on new tools like multimodal transcriptions and multimodal corpora.
""
Subverting the Hierarchy of Consumable Content in China’s Social Media
Special Issue of Communication and the Public
(Volume 8, Issue 4, December 2023)
Guest Editor Luis Pérez-González (University of Agder, Norway)
The School will take place in Jiao Tong University, Shanghai once every two years, starting in July 2019 and rotating thereafter with the ARTIS International Research School.