2019 NZCLT annual lecture & symposium
The co-hosted Film Subtitling symposium with special guest, Professor Jorge Diaz-Cintas, proves major success with a full audience at Wellington City Gallery’s Adam Auditorium.
On May 8th, the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation, the Confucius Institute at Victoria University of Wellington, and the Embassy of Spain jointly presented ‘The Future of Film and Video Localisation – A Symposium on Subtitling’, to a full audience at Wellington City Gallery’s Adam Auditorium. At the symposium, Professor Jorge Diaz-Cintas from University College London, the world’s leading expert on audio-visual translation and accessibility, delivered the 2019 NZCLT Annual Lecture. In a lively presentation packed with new data and engaging case studies, Prof Diaz-Cintas spoke about the linguistic, cultural and technical challenges underscoring subtitling and dubbing as forms of multimodal communication and inter-semiotic translation. The lecture was followed by the screening of two subtitled short films by Miya Wang (The Other Side of the World) and Huanhuan Zhang (How to Break Out of Prison), two recent MFA graduates from Victoria’s Miramar Creative Centre. The symposium was rounded up with a panel discussion between Prof Diaz-Cintas and the two filmmakers, moderated by NZCLT Co-director Dr Luo Hui.
The symposium highlighted new directions in teaching and research at Victoria University of Wellington, which launched the Miramar Creative Centre in 2018 and the Master of Intercultural Communication and Applied Translation (MICAT) programme in 2019. Professor Sarah Leggott, Dean of the Faculty of Humanity and Social Sciences, H.E. Fernando Curcio Ruigómez, Ambassador of Spain to New Zealand, and Rebecca Needham, Director of the Confucius institute, spoke at the symposium and emphasised the importance of enabling cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary dialogue between academic, creative and civic communities in New Zealand’s capital city.
Whilst in Wellington, Professor Jorge Diaz-Cintas also gave an interview on the ‘rise of subtitles’ on Radio New Zealand. (https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/standing-room-only/audio/2018694698/the-growth-of-subtitles)