Translation of digitized filmstrips: sociocultural aspects and pedagogical potential

ABSTRACT

Filmstrip (a roll of 35 mm positive film containing still images and text) was a medium widely used in educational settings between the 1940s and 1980s. Projected still images were accompanied either by recorded narration or a text read out aloud for the audience, which made filmstrip a unique multimodal medium before videotapes. Filmstrip can be given a special status in the media history of Eastern Europe, where, in addition to education, it was extensively used in home entertainment. This paper presents the technical and sociocultural aspects of this medium and addresses questions about the current trend of digitization, online publishing and translation of filmstrips by amateurs. The paper argues that working with filmstrips offers considerable pedagogical advantages in foreign language teaching and acquisition. It also discusses a survey conducted at Osaka University, where filmstrip translation was used as a preparatory activity of L1 subtitling. The findings show that besides improving learners’ reading and translation skills, the translation of filmstrips might be an optimal didactic tool for sensitizing learners to questions of audiovisual translation, and preparing them for more complex audiovisual translation tasks such as subtitling.

KEYWORDS:

• filmstrips
• digitization
• foreign language learning
• non-professional translation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Levente Borsos is specially appointed Associate Professor at Osaka University, where he teaches Hungarian language and culture. Over the past five years he has been experimenting with various ways of including audiovisual translation (AVT) in the teaching of Hungarian as a foreign language. As a PhD candidate at Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem (ELTE) (Budapest), his research focuses on cognitive aspects of the use of AVT in foreign language learning.

ORCID

Levente Borsos http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2567-8099

Notes

1. Filmstrips are often mentioned together with slides, in spite of an important technical difference that also has major effects on what kind of content is the most suitable to be published on each of them. A filmstrip is a single strip of film containing a number of individual images in an unalterable sequence. By contrast, slides are individually mounted, with each slide containing one individual image, by which they can be rearranged, augmented or deleted (cf. Cabeceiras, 1991).

2. While most of the data in this section refers to Hungary, the phenomena presented here are also applicable to other ex-communist countries.

3. The 1988–1989 pricelist of the Hungarian state-run filmstrip publisher, Magyar Diafilmgyártó Vállalat, contained 332 fairy tales and 284 educational filmstrips, which is almost equal to the number of listings in 1967: 288 and 334 titles, respectively (data from Bíró, 2001b).

4. The online collection can be found at http://dia.osaarchivum.org. For more details on the project, see Csontó (2015).

5. A large number of Soviet filmstrips are accessible at http://diafilmy.su. Http://diafilm.pl is a website dedicated to Polish filmstrips. A number of digitized filmstrips from the collection of a French association, ‘Association pour la sauvegarde des films fixes en Anjou’, can be found at http://asffa.angers.free.fr.

6. On the concept of multimodality, see Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) and Pérez-González (2014).

7. The relationship between these components makes filmstrips resemble picture books, which are also intended to be read aloud (on issues of their translation, see Dollerup, 2003; Oittinen, 2003).

8. Translations of the Russian-Australian informant, Nikita Kondratov, are accessible online at http://soviet-diafilms.blogspot.com. The Greek informant, Theodoros Blitsas, publishes his translations at https://sites.google.com/site/theosbazaar/Home/tainiotheke. Both informants were interviewed via e-mail in January 2016.