ABSTRACT
The term narratology was coined by Todorov (1969: 10) to designate an emerging discipline envisioned as the ‘science of narrative’. Narratology, however, has come to be perceived as a ‘humanities discipline’ that articulates concepts and models ‘widely used as heuristic tools’ for the study of narrative (Meister 2014). Originally oriented towards the study of literary texts, many of narratology’s analytic advances have proven useful for narrative film analysis, including translation research driven by the insight that ‘the reason for making a film is to tell a story’ (Zabalbeascoa, Izard and Santamaría 2001: 109). The present chapter begins by exploring the classical concepts of narratology as developed in literary theory, before proceeding to consider to what extent such concepts apply to audiovisual narrative. The bulk of this chapter then examines the relevance of narratology to the study of audiovisual narrative in translation, and discusses a variety of narratological insights that bear on narratives conveyed across media, subtitling, dubbing and audio description: action, plot, narration, description, narrativity, focalization and characterization. The focus is on narrative film fiction, that is, narrative films about a fictional story world.
