Points of View in Kraków

I participated in the Points of View Conference in Kraków where I talked about teaching voiceover in Poland. Here’s the abstract of my talk:

As a much under-researched type of audiovisual translation, voiceover has been dubbed the ugly duckling (Orero 2006) or a Cinderella (Woźniak in press) of AVT studies. The negligent approach to voiceover has begun to change with some publications (the first ever book by Franco, Matamala and Orero devoted solely to voiceover published last year) and training courses (e.g. at UAB in Barcelona). The marginal position of voiceover in Western European countries may be justified by the predominance of dubbing or subtitling. However, Poland, which is a truly voiceover land due to its preference for VO in many audiovisual genres, also neglects this AVT mode both in research and in training.
This paper describes a voiceover course organised as part of the Postgraduate Programme in Audiovisual Translation offered by the School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University to fill the gap in voiceover training in Poland. First, VO in the West will be confronted with the voiceover practice in Poland. It turns out that many practical guidelines and teaching recommendations as to the creation of voiceover developed in the West have no application in a voiceover land, where VO is predominantly used not only for documentaries and interviews, but also for fiction genres. Second, contents of a theoretical and practical course will be discussed alongside the author’s experience gained during the organisation of the first AVT programme and VO course in Poznań. Finally, perception of voiceover in the Polish context will be presented together with some interesting research avenues worth pursuing in the voiceover land.