Guest editors
Jorge Díaz-Cintas (University College London)
Lydia Hayes (University College London & University of Bristol)

In the privileged position of de facto lingua franca worldwide, English has been either the source or pivot language of innumerable translations over the past century, especially insofar as audiovisual texts are concerned. With the arrival of the talkies, the film industry began to be dominated by Hollywood, giving rise to postproduction industries around the globe dedicated to the localisation of imported English-language content. Whereas in countries where English is not a native language these English-language originals were and continue to be mainstreamed on TV channels and in cinema theatres, in the Anglosphere, non-English-language, or ‘foreign’, content was traditionally reserved for art-house cinemas until recent times. The surge of subscription video-on-demand (SVoDs) platforms—such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and HBO—has witnessed a balancing act whereby ‘foreign’ content is now mainstreamed alongside English-language originals. This shift in the distribution paradigm has generated more need for the localisation into English of audiovisual content, which has brought about a growth in the English-subtitling industry as well as the emergence of a burgeoning English-dubbing industry in the US, UK, mainland Europe, and India (Hayes, 2021).