Subtitle Revision in Translator Training: A Case Study of Revisional Modifications in TED Translation Crowdsourcing

Abstract

Revision training and audiovisual translation have recently become an essential part of translator training in Hungary (Robin and Zachar 2020, Horváth 2011). This article intends to combine the two areas and analyse audiovisual translation revision of student translators. Although scientific research has already moved also into the field of examining the revision process of scientific and technical documents and the post-editing process of machine-translated texts, thorough research into the revision process of audiovisual texts, and especially crowdsourced subtitles, is still scarce. The main aims of this paper are, firstly, to investigate the types of revisional interventions student revisers (i.e. non-professional revisers) perform, secondly, to describe the cooperation processes between translators and revisers and finally, to examine whether the audiovisual translation mode influences the revisional modifications of the revisers. My case study in this paper is conducted by analysing the translations and revisions of three TED Talks. The TED Talks translations of translation studies university students (i.e. non-professional translators) were subject to in-house revision. The findings show that a more efficient cooperation between translators and revisers could significantly improve the quality of the translations. In order to achieve this goal, the translator training programmes should draw the attention of the students to the importance of the revision process, provide them with the necessary theoretical background to revision and familiarize them with the genre-specific and translation mode-specific norms.