Screen-to-text discourses: Writing in an audiovisual context

Vortrag von Dr. Thomas Messerli (Universität Basel)

In my talk, based on the research I published over the last five years, I delve into the ways three types of written discourse are shaped by their orientation towards the screen.

1. Subtitling is not only a diagonal translational process that renders spoken dialogue into a written target text in the same or a different language. It is also a voice of the collective sender (the conglomerate of agents who together produce film or television), a part of telecinematic meaning-making, and a text genre that is shaped by its copresence with and orientation towards an audiovisual artefact.

2. Pseudo-synchronous comments written by fans while watching television episodes are a way of engaging with other fans as well as with the contemporaneously streaming fictional artefact. 

3.Scholarly transcription of film or television data metonymically renders the same audiovisual artefact in a more distant offscreen fashion but is similarly shaped by its focus towards the screen.

Employing a linguistic pragmatic lens to these discourses, I outline the characteristics of screen-to-text discourse in terms of the commonalities between these three types of texts while also highlighting some of the particularities each type of data exhibits – from authoritative pre-processing of information in subtitles, to collaborative meaning-making in comments, to a selective reproduction and recontextualization in transcription.

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