Plenary abstract: In the digital era, some people cannot avoid trying to catch a magic glimpse of the future of film: with digitization, it would be far cheaper to shoot, cut, edit, duplicate, distribute, and release, and even cheaper to write scripts, produce special effects, adjust the lights, dress the set, apply the makeup, find the costumes, etc. For others, the brave new digital world does not help you to tell a better story, will not replace the mystical experience of watching a film in a cinema.

               
However, for everybody, the length of time between films being made and when they are shown (in DVD, on the Internet and the mobile telephone) is getting shorter, the commercial and technical convergence between the media, telecommunications and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is speeding up, and the relationship between the owners of rights and distributors is also changing rapidly. For all that, can we yet, or should we even, dream of digitopia?

               This presentation will deal with these changes and their implications for audiovisual translators. In dynamic “screen texts”, language, image and sound are related in many different ways and other semiotic resources are intermingled such as gesture, gaze, colours, framing, camera position/movement, etc., rhythm combining and integrating all of them (also partly defining film genres).

              To what extent are all these “devices” culturally specific and conventionalized? Is there not a tension, or even a contradiction, between the “local” film (its meaning rather than its content) and the “global” distribution (technology)? Is this tension added to the potentially conflicting meanings between the different semiotic modes, between the verbal and visual narratives, between the polysemous nature of verbal and visual representations? What strategies are available for the translator-viewer to (re)contextualize these meanings?