A Statistical Analysis on the Evolution of Terms Used for the Name of Audiovisual Translation Research Field

Abstract

With the help of Web of Science, a research platform, and EndNote, a software tool for managing bibliographies, using quantitative research methods, this paper searches the different English terms used for the name of audiovisual translation research field, i.e. “audiovisual translation”, “film translation”, “cinema translation”, “television translation” or “TV translation”, “screen translation”, “multimedia translation”, “multidimensional translation” and “multimodal translation”, as topic terms in SSCI and A&HCI of Web of Science Core Collection, and makes an statistical analysis on the filtered 8 sets of reference data in the aspects of time intervals, countries or territories, authors, organizations, source titles and research concerns, trying to verify the hypothesis that those different terms manifest their features of concentrating distribution in the above-mentioned aspects, and describe a path along which the terms used for the name of audiovisual translation research field have evolved. In the end, an conclusion has been attained based on the data results: the usage of each term has no feature of concentrating distribution in the aspects of authors or source titles; the usage of some terms possesses features of concentrating distribution in the aspects of time intervals, countries or territories and organizations to some extent; the usage of different terms indicates different emphases of research concerns to some degree. Moreover, the number of the literature collected by searching each term ranks from the most to the lest, “audiovisual translation” 87 papers, “screen translation” 22 papers, “film translation” 6 papers, “multimodal translation” 3 papers, “television translation” or “TV translation” 2 papers, “multimedia translation” 2 papers, “cinema translation” 0 paper, “multidimensional translation” 0 paper, and thereby the using of audiovisual translation and screen translation is the current main trend.