Audiovisual Translation, Audiences and Reception

The complexity of media audiences has long been at the core of the academic debate, across disciplines and over decades. Many are the factors feeding such complexity: the ever-changing nature of the media, in terms of production and distribution, the shifting composition of the audience(s) and the ways in which media texts are consumed, which make empirical research on their reception a renewed challenge. From a translation studies perspective, the reception of translated audiovisual texts has only recently been made the object of systematic investigation, spurred by the ever-more frequent recourse to technologies for behavioural and psychological measures such as eye trackers, electroencephalography (EEG) or galvanic skin response, but also fueled by the growing sophistication of long-standing tools like questionnaires, today administered in a host of different ways. Another main reason behind the increasing sensitivity to the audience response to media and their (translated) texts is to be found in the significant expansion of media accessibility studies, for which a knowledge of the needs and traits of the primary audience (deaf/hard of hearing, blind/partially sighted) has always been tantamount. In this chapter, the concept of audience will be explored in relation to the audiovisual media, as no discussion or exploration of media reception can proceed without a prior definition of the audience itself, its nature and its role in relation to the media. Subsequently media reception studies will be at the forefront, adopting a twofold perspective so as to trace 1) the evolution of the study of media reception and 2) the development of audiences for media over time.