This paper presents an outline of current audiovisual translation practises in Poland. It
situates audiovisual translation (AVT) within the larger context of Translation Studies,
discussing its characteristics, problems and challenges to be faced in the nearest future.
In Poland AVT has traditionally been associated with cinema subtitling and television
voice-over, of which the latter – to the baffl ement of many AVT scholars – still enjoys
great popularity. However, these two major AVT modes are accessible mostly to people
without disabilities. The question of accessibility of the media to the deaf and hardof-
hearing as well as the blind and visually impaired is now beginning to be tackled
in Poland. So far, it is only the public television TVP that offers programmes with
audiodescription, subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing or sign language interpreting.
Hopefully, new EU regulations have a chance to pave the way to increase the accessibility
of audiovisual programs and to open new fi elds of research in AVT.

Le présent article tend à défi nir les particularités de la traduction audiovisuelle (TAV)
qui est perçue dans une perspective plus large de la traduction des multimédias. L’auteur
signale les problèmes majeurs qui se présentent dans ce type de transfert inter- ou intralinguistique,
a savoir la relation la langue de départ et la langue d’arrivée, la relation
entre le code écrit et le code oral ou un autre type de code non verbal, la relation entre
le message verbal et le son et l’image et fi nalement la relation entre le message verbal
et le support sur lequel il est enregistré. Ces quatre éléments se trouvent à la base de la
defi nition de la TAV.

As is commonly known, Polish AVTs are dominated by voice-over – a cultural phenomenon
of the post-communist state. Given the translation reality of the contemporary
European TV market, whenever voice-over is applied to movie translations, it is
perceived as a painful legacy of the Communist era. No matter which translation mode
an average fi lm viewer prefers, it is the TV corporation that decides whether to dub,
voice-over or subtitle a foreign fi lm, and then broadcast it to the viewers. This paper
attempts to unravel the tangle of confl icting claims on voice-over as a fi lm translation
mode from an academic viewpoint based on linguistics, translation studies and cultural
linguistics. In the authors’ view, there are three main technical barriers for voice-over
which a translator needs to take into account at any stage of his work: the translator’s
personality, translation conventions commonly accepted by fi lm translators and legal
regulations.

Within the relatively new fi eld of audiovisual translation studies, voice-over has been
given very little attention and very little credit, even in Poland, where it is used extensively
in TV translation of motion pictures. Similarly, the science-fi ction fi lm genre
– especially its television form – is usually treated with some contempt and considered
not worthy of serious research, except for sociological reasons. The two main issues
discussed in this paper are: fi rstly, the ontological status of the s-f fi lm, the specifi city
and function of its language and the general problems of its translation; secondly, the
weaknesses and strengths of Polish voice-over practice, illustrated by the analysis of
various Star Trek translations and compared with its dubbed and subtitled versions. The
examination of the fi lm material leads to the conclusion that, in spite of the negative
evaluation of voice-over by scholars, this translation practice has some potential. If
fully exploited, it could offer a valid alternative to dubbing and subtitling techniques.

The National Film Board of Canada is a federal cultural agency that has participated
in the wider discourses of Canadian society since its foundation in 1939, both as a producer
of innovative, award-winning fi lms and as a key player in shaping national identities
and engaging with government policy. While most research considers the NFB’s
French-language and English-language productions as separate threads of its history,
a translation studies perspective can draw attention to the versions of its fi lms and study
the insights they offer as a specifi c practice within audiovisual translation. This article
provides a brief overview of the NFB’s versioning history, evoking various translation
issues that emerge over the decades. It then focuses on one documentary, the highly
praised French-language feature fi lm Pour la suite du monde (For the Ones to Come)
(Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault, 1963). Because both a voice-over and a subtitled
version of this fi lm were produced, the two English versions can be compared to see
how different translation strategies affect the voice of the fi lm – and that of the NFB,
which comes through implicitly.

Audiovisual texts are more and more popular among the young. Thus, the extensive
watching of TV and videos with subtitles may enhance foreign language(s) acquisition
both through incidental and intended learning. In this article various types of subtitles
and language combinations are discussed with the view to their educational potential.
Ideas on how to use videos in a language classroom in a receptive and creative ways are
also presented. The author suggests extensive multidisciplinary research is required to
examine the reception of audiovisual texts as educational aids in language learning.

Subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH) contain not only dialogue, but also
the description of all the sounds necessary to understand the meaning of an audiovisual
programme. In Poland SDH have been available since 1994 on two major channels
of the public television TVP (accessible via teletext, page 777). SDH are also available
on DVDs released by TVP. Recently other commercial distributors have joined
in. Initially, TVP made only pre-recorded SDH (with inserted time-codes), which were
broadcast automatically. Since 2003 TVP has been broadcasting semi-live subtitles for
its two news programmes every day.
Viewers with hearing impairments do not comprise a uniform group. There are
those whose fi rst language is Polish Sign Language; those who lost hearing after having
acquired Polish as their mother tongue; and those who are hard of hearing, mainly the
aged. Each of these groups has different language competences and different expectations
concerning SDH. Thus, preparing SDH that would satisfy the expectations of all the viewers seems
to be an impossible task. It is up to researchers to answer why some hearing impaired
viewers are not completely satisfi ed with SDH, or to what degree viewers are able to
follow and comprehend the content of subtitled audiovisual materials. We, the practitioners,
face other challenges. The fact that public broadcasters may soon be legally
obliged to have all their programmes subtitled means not only an increase in the volume
of subtitles produced, but also a greater variety of genres and the need to re-defi ne SDH
standards.

Audio description (AD) is an intersemiotic translation technique that allows blind and
partially sighted people access to the visual side of various cultural events, such as fi lm,
play, exhibition, or dance performance. While Poland has only just begun work in this
area, other Western European countries and the USA have developed their own professional
audio description standards. Recently, there appeared an idea to harmonize such
standards so as to facilitate and accelerate the production of audiodescribed materials
(for example, by way of translating AD scripts). However, before this happens, it is
necessary to determine whether cultural differences in the perception and description of visual stimuli are not so signifi cant as to undermine the development of such harmonized
guidelines. This article presents the Polish contribution to the fi rst stage of
the international Pear Tree Project, whose purpose is to perform such verifi cation. The
project uses methodology on visual perception and narration developed by Chafe for
the Pear Stories Project in the 1970s, which can be applied to research such aspects essential
to AD as the presentation of events irrelevant to plot development, the neutral
description or subjective interpretation of events, the use of fi lm jargon, the type of
tense used, or stylistic variation. Some of the Polish data have been compared against
the data obtained in the original Pear Stories Project by Tannen (1980) for American
English and Greek as well as against the data from a test carried out as part of the
Pear Tree Project for Spanish (Orero 2008). It should be emphasized that the results
presented in the article are preliminary; however, in the authors’ opinion, they are very
promising for both AD research and practice.