Translating Beyond Words: Paralinguistic Challenges in Machine Translation and Audiovisual Translation

Translation is not limited to transferring words and grammatical structures from one language into another, because communication also depends on voice, emotion, intonation, pauses, gestures, facial expressions, and other paralinguistic signals. This article examines the main difficulties that arise when such information is transferred through machine translation and audiovisual translation. Particular attention is given to stress, intonation, tone of voice, hesitation, laughter, sarcasm, gestures, and culturally specific visual signals. The study uses a qualitative comparative approach and analyzes representative examples in order to identify how communicative meaning may be weakened or lost during automated translation. The discussion shows that a translation can be lexically and grammatically correct while still failing to reproduce the speaker’s emotional attitude or communicative intention. The article therefore argues that future translation technologies should treat paralinguistic information as an important part of meaning rather than as secondary information.