Sociopragmatic competence through AVT in the Japanese Language Classroom

Audiovisual translation (AVT) is a branch of translation studies, dealing with the transfer of multisemiotic texts and multimedia elements into another language or culture. In the case of foreign language teaching, where the multimedia dimension inherent in a subtitled product implies a double cognitive process of listening-reading, learners are often called to decipher verbal, paraverbal and extraverbal aspects of language (such as vestemics, objectemics, kinesics). From an interdisciplinary teaching perspective, teacher can nowadays exploit the above sociopragmatic competence in order to engage learners in a new way of language learning that might allow them to take advantage of their Japanese knowledge and subtitling theory for dealing with new linguistic contents at a higher level of competence.