War of intelligences in film translation (typhlocommentary/audiodescription)

Abstract

“Intersemiotic transposition” as a type of intersemiotic translation, known since Roman Jacobson’s works, provides the transition from one system of signs to another. Such a transposition, as a rule, is carried out from the verbal to the visual interpretation, which finds its explicit expression in ballet, sculpture, illustrations for literary works, as well as film adaptations, where traditional types of film translation such as dubbing, voice­over translation and subtitling are widely used. Subtitling, with a certain assumption, can be carried out through the use of machine translation and human post­editing. But what about the interpretation “from the visual to the verbal,” which is characteristic, in particular, of works of visual art as culturally and aesthetically significant objects? Will a machine cope with such a type of translation of statics into dynamics? Research into machine translation of sign language gestures has been carried out since 1977. A robotic hand is used to translate words into sign language gestures (the alphabet into the dactyl alphabet) to help people with hearing disabilities to communicate. The situation gets more complicated when one has to describe the dynamics of “moving pictures” for blind and visually impaired viewers during audiovisual translation (typhlo commentary/audio description). Even people who do not have visual limitations may face some difficulties of interpretation in spite of the explicit verbalization of the characters’ body movements in the film. These and other problems are still to be addressed.

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