The vast majority of audio described films in Poland are domestic productions, with a small handful of others which are dubbed. This stands in stark contrast with the great number of films imported from other countries, usually the United States, which constitute the mainstream of the audiovisual landscape in Poland.
Since the dominating mode on Polish TV is voice-over, blind and partially sighted people have access to the voiced-over dialogues along with sighted viewers. This means that they can hear the voice of the reader (called lector in Polish) on top of the original voices, whose volume is turned down. What they do not get, however, is the description of the images, the actions, the protagonists, the sounds, etc.
So how should foreign films for visually impaired audiences be audio described? In my paper I would like to present results of an experiment that I carried out with students at the Institute of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warsaw. The experiment was aimed at audio describing a few (audio described) American films – with voice-over or subtitles as the audiovisual translation modality.
Audio describing films in a language different from the AD track is not exactly virgin territory. In Poland, in the late 1990s, several voiced-over American films – called ‘typhlo-films’, from Greek ‘typhlos’ meaning ‘blind’ – were audio described. The poor quality of the recording together with the crude language of the description may have contributed to the fact that the films did not become very popular and that this path was not pursued. It seems, however, that taking advantage of voice-over to audio describe foreign films is worthy of further investigation.
Another exciting research area seems to be audio subtitling combined with AD. Both methods probably require expending additional effort on the part of blind audiences. It would be interesting to see which translation mode is easier to process. Is it perhaps the case that Polish audiences who are used to voice-over will prefer AD to be accompanied by voice-over rather than audio subtitling? How translatable is the original (here: American) audio description? These and other relevant questions will be addressed in my paper.

Agnieszka SZARKOWSKA holds a PhD in Translation from the Institute of English Studies at the University of Warsaw (Poland). She now works as an assistant professor at the Institute of Applied Linguistics at her alma mater, where she teaches translation. Her research interests include audiovisual translation, especially subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing, interlingual subtitling, audio description as well as translator training and e learning. She is a member of the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation and a participant in the DTV4ALL project.