Audiovisual translation in Portugal. The story so far

In the last two decades, developments such as digital TV, DVD and Blue Ray DVD as well as theatre subtitling and interactive museums, together with a higher concern with accessibility, has led to a considerable boom in the audiovisual industry, only parallel to an ever-higher demand for the different modes of audiovisual translation (AVT). Even though our first thought when thinking of audiovisual translation goes to subtitling and dubbing, other translational modes have to be taken under consideration, like audiodescription or voice-over, as well as different mediums like screen, theatre or museums, etc. The widening of scope has led to a development of audiovisual translation as a research field with new challenges, and, consequently, to the call of new adapted research methods. Parallel to the fact that the different AVT practices are now understood as different “translational modes belonging to a superordinate text type — the audiovisual one” (Diaz-Cintas, 2009), the field of AVT is nowadays to be taken, not within Literary or Adaption Studies, but as an autonomous field within the broader domain of Translation Studies. It is the intention of this article to present a) an overview of the different audiovisual translational modes, as well as b) a diagnosis of the academic research that is being undertaken on the subject, giving a special focus to the situation in Portugal.