Methodology of teaching audiovisual meme translation
The study focuses on teaching the translation of audiovisual memes: comic image/video and text combinations that tend to go viral on the Internet. The key features of a meme are a comic effect resulting from surprise, disrupted expectations, the clash between the text and the video; “viral” expansion across the Internet and other social media. Mastering the skills required to translate such audiovisual content is essential since memes are highly popular on the Internet with all age groups, there are numerous allusions references to the popular memes in the mass media, fiction, movies, and TV series. Teaching audiovisual meme translation shall consist of analyzing the meme properties, building meme comprehension and metacognitive analysis skills, and mastering specific approaches and techniques for meme representation in the source and target languages. An emphasis should be placed on developing the ability to adequately reconstruct meme ecosystems in the source language and find their analogs in the target language as well as the skills required to identify archetypical narratives in the source language and build them in the target language. It is shown that memes have some similarities to set expressions and proverbs. The meme translation curriculum shall build the ability to find and translate set expressions and proverbs in audiovisual works. It is also shown that translation teachers should have specialized training in teaching the translation of memes as a special type of audiovisual content. It can be implemented in the format of short seminars/webinars, or within the teacher further education framework.