Assessing the Impact of Audiovisual Translation on the Improvement of Academic Literacy

Abstract

Audiovisual translation (AVT) or screen translation is a term used to refer to any language and cultural transfer aimed at translating original dialogues coming from any acoustic or visual product. Academic Literacy (AL) is viewed as the ability to cope with the reading, thinking and reasoning demands required of a student entering a higher education institution. An assessment of the impact of AVT on the academic literacy (AL) of freshmen at the University of Buea by exposing them to different types of subtitled popular films namely dramas and documentaries within four months showed a statistically significantly higher improvement in AL levels of groups that saw subtitled films than of a control group that did not see films. Data was collected from the Test of Academic Literacy Levels (TALL) pre-test and post-test developed in South Africa and from observations. The specific areas of improvement in AL were in vocabulary, text comprehension and text editing abilities. A further assessment of possible differences in AL among Anglophones and Francophones who were tested separately showed the same level of improvement thus confirming the fact that intralingual subtitling could be used effectively for the improvement of AL regardless of the film genre and whether English is being studied as a second language (for Anglophones) or third language (for Francophones).

Keywords: Audiovisual translation, screen translation, Subtitling, intralanguage subtitling, academic literacy

REVUE DE L’ACADEMIE DES SCIENCES DU CAMEROUN Vol. 11 No. 1 (2013)