Heliyon (Jul 2021)
The intricacies of voicing over documentaries from English into Arabic: implications for translator training
Abstract
The present paper is designed to shed some light on one of the main subfields of audiovisual translation, namely voice-over, and mainly attempts to capture the intricacies involved in English–Arabic translation of a BBC television documentary entitled NW Great. The sample of the study consists of 10 MA translation students at Al-Quds University, enrolled in Audiovisual Translation I for the academic year 2016/2017. The paper confirms what Orero (2004) is inclined to conclude, that besides voice-over's main defining features, namely faithfulness and synchrony, etc., student translators are commonly faced with several technical (e.g., synchrony in voice-over, observable in the same way as Orero (2004) argues, close-ups, etc.) and linguistic problems and potential semantic and stylistic loss. The study also has a pedagogical angle thought to be useful to trainers and trainees of the audiovisual translation mode of voice-over.
