Audiovisual translation in Cameroon: An Analysis of Voice-over in Cameroon Radio and Television (CRTV)

Abstract

Cameroon is a multilingual country with people from different backgrounds with English and French as the official languages. The need to render information broadcast on television channels across the country to the population is accordingly of paramount importance. This can be achieved through subtitling and dubbing which attracted interest and have occupied an important place on both the national and privately run television channels. Other techniques of information dissemination such as voice-over which is a mode of audiovisual translation are lagging behind due to lack of understanding of the process. In academic circles, very little has been published on voice-over in the country unfortunately thus, very few people really understand what it is all about. The aim of this study was therefore to analyse voice-over mode using the national television channel (CRTV) through transcription and comparison of original French versions of interviews and the corresponding voice-over English versions. The results showed that synchrony which is an important aspect in the translation of voice-over was not respected and that the omission of words and the shortening of expressions in the process limited the viewer and the listener from grasping the entire message from the original interview. Furthermore, the use of deceptive similarities disconcerted and confused the viewers who naturally question the authenticity of the voice-over and become distracted from the rest of the speech of the interviewee. The use of divergence in the corpus caused more harm than good, given the fact that diverting from the message conveyed in the original interview prevented the viewers from getting the original message as it was delivered by the speaker. Procedures to ameliorate the quality of voiceover translation mode in television networks across the country are proposed based on these results.

Key Words: Audiovisual translation, subtitling, dubbing, voice-over, information.