Foreword

Linguistica Antverpiensia is a journal with a long and rich history. According to its website, it was first published in 1967 at the then Higher Institute for Translators and Interpreters in Antwerp and it initially covered the broad field of general and applied linguistics. At the dawn of the new millennium, it was renamed Linguistica Antverpiensia New Series – Themes in Translation Studies (LANS-TTS) and this change of title signalled a watershed transformation into a journal dedicated to Translation Studies. Only a couple of years before, Aline Remael had taken over the helm as Chief Editor and it was she who made sure that the restyling of the journal was steered in the right direction. Since 2012 the journal has been indexed in the Web of Science, the formal proof of its academic excellence and international renown, and Aline undoubtedly played a major role in this achievement.

In a sense, we could say that LANS-TTS’s academic excellence and international renown are a symbolic reflection of Aline’s career as a whole. Her contribution to the field of audiovisual translation (AVT), for example, cannot be overestimated. After early contributions on screenwriting, film adaptation and the interplay between image, dialogue and sound, which culminated in a PhD in Germanic Philology in 2000, she contributed a chapter to one of the very first academic volumes ever on (multi)media translation, published within the ambit of the Benjamins Translation Library. In 2006 she was guest editor of a special issue on AVT of the Journal of Specialised Translation. One year later, she published, together with Jorge Díaz Cintas, Audiovisual Translation: Subtitling, the seminal handbook that has since introduced hundreds of students worldwide to the realm of subtitling and which will briefly be relaunched with an additional focus on the latest evolutions in our increasingly digital and intercultural age.

This keen awareness of new developments in society has always inspired Aline’s research and made her one of the pioneers in the field of media accessibility, the topic of this issue of LANS-TTS. As early as 2006 she published an article on the need for and the training of live subtitling in Flanders. Since then, hardly a year has gone by when she has not published at least one article on one of the many new aspects live subtitling or audio description introduced to the field of AVT. Indeed, Aline has always been incredibly active as a researcher, as witnessed also by her involvement in various national and international research projects: she co-authored the European guidelines on audio description that were the final deliverable of the European Lifelong Learning Project ADLAB – Lifelong Access for the Blind; she was involved in defining professional profiles for various access service providers such as the Accessibility Manager or Coordinator, the Audio Describer and, currently, the Interlingual Live Subtitler, in the ACT, ADLAB PRO and ILSA projects, respectively.

Collaboration means strength. This could have been one of Aline’s mottos if we look at the list of projects above, not to speak of the list of memberships of (inter)national research groups and academic associations. Not only was she head of the University of Antwerp’s research group in Translation, Interpretation and Cultural Studies (TricS), she was also a founding member of the Transmedia Research Group and its Belgian-Dutch affiliate, Transmedia Benelux; she is a former board member of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) and the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (ESIST), and she has retained her board membership of the European Network for Public Service Interpreting and Translation (ENPSIT). It came as no surprise, therefore, that, in 2018, she was awarded the Jan Ivarsson Award for her lifelong dedication to developing the field of AVT and her commitment to furthering research on media accessibility.

Aline’s presence in the academic world of translation studies has always been so prominent that we would almost forget that she was also a lecturer who made AVT and its new developments – such as audio description, subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing and intralingual and interlingual live subtitling – one of the core disciplines in the Master’s programmes in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Antwerp. No doubt, the fact that she was such an inspired teacher explains the decision by various students (and even colleagues) of hers to undertake a PhD in Translation Studies under her supervision, one of whom recently won the EST Young Scholar Prize.

All the values that clearly emerge from this all-too-short overview of Aline Remael’s impressive professional career are the same that she embraces in her personal life. She has a passionate interest in so many different aspects of the world around her. Not only is she highly cultured but she also follows closely all the relevant technical and social evolutions in our society. And, probably most importantly, what preoccupies her are the ways in which culture and knowledge can improve the general well-being not only of the people around her but also of society at large.

Last year Aline was accorded emeritus status which – fortunately – did not amount to retirement. On the contrary, she is as active as ever and, hopefully, will continue to be so for many years to come! Yet in honour of all the work she has done and what she has meant and still means to the field of (audiovisual) Translation Studies, we want to dedicate this issue of LANS-TTS to Aline: it reflects some of her major passions: for research, for teaching and for a better life for all.

Gert Vercauteren

Iwona Mazur

The Antwerp team