Documentary Voice-over Assessment Principles

Among Russian-speaking researchers, film translation is still considered to be an insufficiently understood phenomenon, even though the audiovisual translation is widely used. In the Russian tradition, voice-over is the type of audiovisual translation mainly used for documentary films. This research aims to formulate the principles for assessing voice-over translation of documentaries in the English-Russian language pair. To achieve this purpose, publications available on the subject have been reviewed to become the basis of the comparative source language and target language text study. The practical significance of the work lies in the establishment of principles for assessing the quality of the audiovisual translation of documentaries. Moreover, the principles have been applied to the analysis of documentary film texts, and the validity of the approach has been confirmed and illustrated. These principles can be used to create guidelines for translators to rely on. Keywords: audiovisual translation, voice-over translation, film translation, translation assessment principles