Chapter 22 offers an overview of the field focusing on both established and emerging modalities, from traditional transfer modes such as dubbing, subtitling and voice-over, to modes that provide accessibility for people with sensory impairment, such as subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, audio description, live-subtitling and sign language. Non-professional translation practices such as fansubbing, fandubbing and film remaking are also discussed. For each mode, the chapter illustrates the associated medium-specific constraints and creative possibilities, highlighting the power of audiovisuals to contribute to meaning in ways that lend themselves to manipulation during the translation process.

This chapter takes us into the realm of social media platforms and the key role of Arabic linguistics in social media adaptation to the communicative needs of the Arab world. Through the localizing of social media platforms and the development and implementation of language policy, Johnson examines ‘the process of translating and adapting software to a new language and cultural context’. Issues such as collaborative translation and crowdsourcing have been instrumental in transforming social media discussion in Arabic formats. Providing a rundown of key issues in the adaptation of social media technology to different language areas, Johnson contextualizes the emergence of language policy and practice relating to translation and localization of social media texts, and discusses issues of translation and transliteration that apply both generally and specifically to the Arab world.

Thanks to their ubiquitous presence in today’s society and their arresting nature, audiovisual productions have become the quintessential expression of multimodal communication in the 21st century. Video materials are a constant occurrence in an ever increasingly interconnected world, in which translation has become imperative in order to foster global communication across different languages and cultures. Interest in audiovisual translation (AVT) as a proper object of academic inquiry has been growing steadily and exponentially for the last three decades. This paper starts with a discussion of the main developments that, propitiated by technology, are shaping the new digital mediascape and propelling AVT to take centre stage. After exploring the multimodal specificities that set audiovisual material apart from other types of texts, an overview of the main translation modes is offered. The paper then moves to the focal point of this contribution, namely a discussion on the main conceptual, thematic and methodological perspectives that best characterise the research conducted in this domain.