Exploring creative audiovisual translation in the age of AI

Abstract The past decade has seen the Web 2.0 expand dramatically: content creators nowadays dominate the scene and dictate trends in a plethora of social dimensions within a mediascape no longer dominated by traditional TV and replaced by top streamers and social platforms. The massive quantity of audiovisual content produced in multiple other languages requires interlingual mediation into English. Thus, the need to create cost-effective translations has propelled audiovisual translation (AVT) technological developments in an unprecedented manner. Against this background, this paper dives into a peculiar aspect of AVT, that of creative subtitling in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), which has been challenging traditional workflows, and calling for innovative localization strategies. Creative subtitling, in the form of intertitles, in- and out-show comments and web-subs, provides a novel way of conceiving AVT in the digital age, not as a largely automated activity with a pinch of human touch, but as an artistic process in the hands of directors, creators and professional translators.