Audiovisual Translation in Romanian TV News Programmes

This paper proposes an investigation into the place of audiovisual translation in Romanian television news programmes. Although news translation has attracted a lot of attention in recent years, the same cannot be said about the various forms of audiovisual translation used in news programmes, which might range from interlingual subtitling and voice-over to media interpreting and signed language interpreting. The present paper attempts to highlight the contexts in which these types of translation are used in Romanian broadcast news, their features and functions. We will begin by discussing the concept of news translation and contrast it with audiovisual translation in the news. This will be followed by an overview and short description of the different forms of audiovisual translation encountered in the news. Based on this framework, we will then conduct a small-scale survey of several news broadcasts of the Romanian public television service in order to identify the situations in which a particular type of audiovisual translation tends to be used, as well as the reasons for resorting to it and ensuing results.