Censorship and Manipulation in Audiovisual Translation

Abstract

This chapter provides a critical survey of the research on censorship and manipulation in audiovisual translation. Institutional censorship practices continue to affect the border-crossing mobility of audiovisual narratives for ideological and socio-cultural governance in various societies. While existing reports mostly refer to manipulation as wilful distortion, alternation, and elimination of source information, it is also evident that translators and filmmakers tend to manipulate source information for more creative outcomes. Manipulation can be politically as well as economically motivated; wherever censorship regulates and supresses, it simultaneously stimulates creativity in translators whose final outputs are crucial to the fate of the original at the threshold of the anticipated marketplace. In addition, the role and efficiency of censorship must be re-examined beyond the binary schemas of freedom and oppression, of creativity and restriction, and of global democracies and authoritarian regimes, in light of the changing role of audiences from consumers to prosumers and digital citizens in response to the constantly evolving media and social environments.