Audiovisual translation through the ages

The chapter outlines the history of audiovisual translation (AVT) from its inception, approximately fifty years after the first film was released, to the present day. It tackles the difficulty that AVT faced before being recognized as a discipline and illustrates its fast development and dynamic expansion. It also deals with the changes that occurred in the research approach to the discipline, which has slowly shifted from text-centred, isolated, and mononational to user-centred, collaborative, and crossnational. After discussing the terminological issues that brought to the establishment of the label “audiovisual translation”, silent movies, intertitles and film explainers are illustrated along with early talkies, the birth and the chief features of the main AVT modalities, including the accessible ones and those that were born a few decades into the Internet era: fansubbing, non-professional subtitling, crowdsourcing and fandubbing. The chapter closes with a brief overview on current and new trajectories in the field.