A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".
Dubbing is a post-production process used in filmmaking and video production, often in concert with sound design, in which additional or supplementary recordings (doubles) are lip-synced and "mixed" with original production sound to create the finished soundtrack.
Voice-over is a production technique where a voice—that is not part of the narrative (non-diegetic)—is used in a radio, television production, filmmaking, theatre, or other presentations. The voice-over is read from a script and may be spoken by someone who appears elsewhere in the production or by a specialist voice actor. Synchronous dialogue, where the voice-over is narrating the action that is taking place at the same time, remains the most common technique in voice-overs. Asynchronous, however, is also used in cinema. It is usually prerecorded and placed over the top of a film or video and commonly used in documentaries or news reports to explain information.
Closed captioning (CC) and subtitling are both processes of displaying text on a television, video screen, or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information. Both are typically used as a transcription of the audio portion of a program as it occurs, sometimes including descriptions of non-speech elements. Other uses have included providing a textual alternative language translation of a presentation's primary audio language that is usually burned-in to the video and unselectable.
Voice acting is the art of performing voice-overs to present a character or provide information to an audience. Performers are called voice actors/actresses, voice artists, dubbing artists, voice talent, voice-over artists, or voice-over talent. Voice acting is recognised as a specialized dramatic profession in the United Kingdom, primarily due to BBC broadcasts of radio drama production.
A fansub is a version of a foreign film or foreign television program, typically anime or dorama which has been translated by fans and subtitled into a language usually other than that of the original.
Translation studies is an academic interdiscipline dealing with the systematic study of the theory, description and application of translation, interpreting, and localization. As an interdiscipline, translation studies borrows much from the various fields of study that support translation. These include comparative literature, computer science, history, linguistics, philology, philosophy, semiotics, and terminology.
Many East Asian scripts can be written horizontally or vertically. Chinese, Vietnamese Hán Nôm, Korean, and Japanese scripts can be oriented along either axis, as they consist mainly of disconnected logographic or syllabic units, each occupying a square block of space, thus allowing for flexibility for which direction texts can be written, be it horizontally from left-to-right, horizontally from right-to-left, vertically from top-to-bottom, and even vertically from bottom-to-top.
Voice-over translation is an audiovisual translation technique in which, unlike in dubbing, actor voices are recorded over the original audio track which can be heard in the background.
Subtitles are text representing the contents of the audio in a film, television show, opera or other audiovisual media. Subtitles might provide a transcription or translation of spoken dialogue. Although naming conventions can vary, captions are subtitles that include written descriptions of other elements of the audio like music or sound effects. Captions are thus especially helpful to people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. Other times, subtitles add information not present in the audio. Localizing subtitles provide cultural context to viewers, for example by explaining to an unfamiliar American audience that sake is a type of Japanese wine. Lastly, subtitles are sometimes used for humor, like in Annie Hall where subtitles show the characters' inner thoughts, which contradict what they were actually saying in the audio.
Video game localization, or video game localisation, is the process of preparing a video game for a market outside of where it was originally published. The game's name, art assets, packaging, manuals, and cultural and legal differences are typically altered.
Fan translation refers to the unofficial translation of various forms of written or multimedia products made by fans, often into a language in which an official translated version is not yet available. Generally, fans do not have formal training as translators but they volunteer to participate in translation projects based on interest in a specific audiovisual genre, TV series, movie, etc.
Aegisub is a subtitle editing application. It is the main tool of fansubbing, the practice of creating or translating unofficial subtitles for visual media by fans. It is the successor of the original SubStation Alpha and Sabbu.
A subtitle editor is a type of software used to create and edit subtitles to be superimposed over, and synchronized with, video. Such editors usually provide video preview, easy entering/editing of text, start, and end times, and control over text formatting and positioning. Subtitle editors are available as standalone applications, as components of many video editing software suites, and as web applications.
AirScript is a hand-held device that provides theatregoers with subtitles in a variety of languages. It was designed by Show Translations, a company that specializes in live entertainment translation, and built by Cambridge Consultants, a leading technology and product development firm.
George Roubicek is an Austrian actor, and a dialogue director and script adaptor for English-language versions of foreign films and television shows. Born in Austria, Roubicek appeared in a number of small roles throughout the 1950s, '60s and '70s, including the films The Bedford Incident, Billion Dollar Brain and The Dirty Dozen. In 1967, he appeared in The Tomb of the Cybermen, a four-part Doctor Who serial. He played the part of Semenkin in The Champions. Roubicek had a small role in A New Hope, the first Star Wars film, as the Imperial Commander Praji. He also appeared in two James Bond films, You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me.
Surtitles, also known as supertitles, SurCaps, OpTrans, are translated or transcribed lyrics/dialogue projected above a stage or displayed on a screen, commonly used in opera, theatre or other musical performances. The word "surtitle" comes from the French language "sur", meaning "over" or "on", and the English language word "title", formed in a similar way to the related and similarly-named subtitle. The word Surtitle is a trademark of the Canadian Opera Company.
Multimodality is the application of multiple literacies within one medium. Multiple literacies or "modes" contribute to an audience's understanding of a composition. Everything from the placement of images to the organization of the content to the method of delivery creates meaning. This is the result of a shift from isolated text being relied on as the primary source of communication, to the image being utilized more frequently in the digital age. Multimodality describes communication practices in terms of the textual, aural, linguistic, spatial, and visual resources used to compose messages.
Emotion recognition is the process of identifying human emotion. People vary widely in their accuracy at recognizing the emotions of others. Use of technology to help people with emotion recognition is a relatively nascent research area. Generally, the technology works best if it uses multiple modalities in context. To date, the most work has been conducted on automating the recognition of facial expressions from video, spoken expressions from audio, written expressions from text, and physiology as measured by wearables.
The European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (ESIST) is an international association in the field of audiovisual translation. According to ESIST, screen translation includes all forms of language transfer in the media, including subtitling, dubbing, voice-over, interpreting for the media, surtitling, subtitling for viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing, and audio description for blind and partially sighted audiences.
