Abstract:

Today, digital technologies are a key driver of competitiveness and innovation in the media, information, and communication technology sectors. It is therefore important to ensure everyone can understand and engage with digital media, which is the essence of the media literacy competence. The European Union Commission itself has highlighted media literacy as a key element of the education and training of citizenship and as vital for economic growth and job creation. In addition to this, the breadth of audiovisual products in our digital world is greater than ever, ranging from films to video games, and involving a number of audiovisual translation modes to convey information between languages, societies and cultures. The role of the professionals working in this field seems to be a cornerstone to this end and formal training of translators at universities should also walk hand in hand with the development of competences that facilitate the understanding of our audiovisual world. In this context, an educational innovation research project has been initiated to improve the training of future audiovisual translators of a Spanish university through the development of their media literacy competence. Drawing on the conviction that audiovisual semiotics are transversally linked to audiovisual translation, this innovation project aims to improve the knowledge and competences that can help to understand and critically approach audiovisual texts within translation undergraduates through a number of didactic activities. Consequently, being audio visually literate can empower future translators to better understand the semiotic information delivered by audiovisual productions and produce higher quality audiovisual translations. As this is an ongoing project, this paper focuses on presenting the project and the preliminary results of the first activities undertaken throughout the academic year 2017/18.

Keywords:

Media literacy, educational innovation, audiovisual translation, audiovisual text, semiotics.