Introduction: Exploring the Many Ways of Audiovisual Translation. Retranslated, Simultaneous, Indirect, Mediated or What?

Over the last decade, a growing number of Translation Studies scholars has focused on the many aspects of AVT, as demonstrated by the proliferation of research papers in journals, essay collections and monographs devoted to this topic (e.g. Chiaro 2007; Díaz Cintas 2012; Chaume, 2012; Pérez González 2014, 2018; Maszerowska, Matamala and Orero 2014; Di Giovanni and Gambier 2018; Baños 2018 just to name a few). This has certainly enabled AVT to develop “its very own theoretical and methodological approaches, allowing it to claim the status of a scholarly area of research in its own right” (Díaz-Cintas 2009: 7). One of the interesting consequences of the rapid advances in the production of audiovisual content and the availability of its many translated versions (e.g. dubbed, (fan)subtitled, in respeaking or audio-described) is that the traditional separation between ‘dubbing’ and ‘subtitling’ countries by now appears obsolete (Gambier 2003; Chaume 2013; Sandrelli, this volume). It is probably time we overcame “the frequently futile debate over the pros and cons of dubbing and subtitling, generally simplified to subjective and pseudo-intellectual arguments” (Chaume 2012: 13). Scholarly research on AVT may fare better at exploring the intricacies and resulting phenomena that the current mediascape brings about so as to continue to contribute fruitfully to the advances in theory and practice.