One of the core challenges non-English researchers face when writing research papers in their mother tongue ought to be the translation of English specialised terms. Therefore, translations of reference works originally written in English such as Baker and Saldanha (2009) and Pöchhacker (2015) can be of great help to researchers. However, in Persian-speaking contexts, there is a strongly felt lack of translated reference works from the field of Audiovisual Translation Studies (AVTS).
Hence, in an attempt to address this gap, the volume by Khoshsaligheh et al. supports teaching and research on audiovisual translation (AVT) in Persian-speaking contexts. The book defines and presents a comprehensive overview of 205 AVT entries, from 2D and 3D games to voice-over for production, arranged alphabetically in English alongside their Persian equivalents and drawing on more than 550 references. Each entry is also annotated with a set of related references for further reading. Most of the entries have not been translated into Persian before; therefore, the new Persian equivalents are a great contribution to AVTS in Persian-speaking contexts where more and more research on AVT is being conducted. Not only does the book cover references related to AVT, it also uses sources from other disciplines and inter-disciplines such as Fandom and Game Studies.
Also, the authors critically explain and discuss a few available and important models and taxonomies in AVT literature such as Di Giovanni and Gambier’s map of AVTS (2018) and Díaz Cintas’s forms of subtitling in cyberspace (Díaz Cintas 2018). However, the volume would have benefited from including a few others as well, such as Chaume’s classification of meaning codes in AVT (Chaume 2012).
The alphabetically-arranged index of the book is available in both English and Persian to make it easy for readers to find relevant concepts. However, an additional index including key scholars in the covered field could also have been helpful. Additionally, in a few cases such as the entries “the fourth wall” and “censorship”, the authors have provided examples from films and TV series which facilitate the readers’ understanding of the concepts. Similar examples could have been valuable in other entries such as “graphic code” and “redubbing” as well.
One of the main advantages of the book is the accessible explanations of the concepts. This makes the book an ideal starting point for translation students or novice researchers seeking a synoptic and comprehensive overview of recent scholarship on AVT. Moreover, the authors use examples in Persian for explaining concepts such as ‘elimination’, ‘lip-synchrony’, and ‘official’ translation.
The authors attempt to obtain consistency by defining each entry in one page. However, a few entries such as “audiovisual text” and “translation quality” actually demand further elaboration. In addition, given the rapid developments in AVT, such reference works need to be updated quite frequently to remain a useful resource.
All in all, readers ranging from Persian-speaking AVT practitioners who enjoy reading academic works to junior scholars and students who need to equip themselves with a simpler reference book in their own language before venturing on to more detailed or focused references on a particular AVT topic will benefit from choosing Audiovisual Translation: Concepts and Terms as their first stop. Hence, the book is recommended for Persian-speaking institutions with both undergraduate and graduate programs in Translation Studies. Reference works such as The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation (Pérez-González 2018) and The Palgrave Handbook of Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility (Bogucki and Deckert 2020) have recently been published and a few specialised terms from the field of AVT have been added to the new edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (Baker and Saldanha 2019) as well. Since these references have not been translated into Persian yet, future updated versions of Khoshsaligheh et al.’s volume could also help and inspire the translators and in that way remain the valuable resource that it already is.
Milad Mehdizadkhani
University of Szeged, Hungary
E-mail: mehdizadkhani.milad@stud.u-szeged.hu