There is no doubt that this is the century of technology and that we live in a society in which audiovisual aids are our main means of communication, of leisure… Everyday, we are in contact with audiovisual products that have originally been created in a language different to ours and that have gone through a process of translation.
The audiovisual translation (AVT) market is expanding all over the world. Therefore, there is an increasing need to train future professional audiovisual translators. The academic world has echoed this need and in the last few years research studies and training programmes in AVT have multiplied.
The increase of AVT training programmes at university, together with the Bologna Process proposal of revising and reforming educational systems in all European countries, make this an ideal moment to analyse the current state of AVT training at the tertiary level.
This paper presents the methodology and preliminary results of a descriptive case study on AVT university training in Spain. In order to carry out this study, we have consulted with academics, employers and graduates from the AVT world in Spain through a number of interviews and questionnaires. Furthermore, we have conducted a content analysis of AVT course syllabi being taught in Spanish universities. Our aims are to triangulate the data gathered by these research tools in order to perform an intersection among what is taught at university, what is demanded by the market regarding the professional profiles audiovisual translators must have, and what professional translators do in their daily work, and to put forward some proposals for the improvement of the Spanish AVT university training.