Since a film is a text of great semiotic complexity in which different sign systems (visual and acoustic) co-operate to create a story, translators/ audiodescribers face the challenge to create a coherent text in terms of grammatical and semiotic aspects. The syntax and the lexical choices of the audio described screenplay must be connected to the audio and the image of the audiovisual material, in order to allow the blind or visually impaired audience to make the necessary inferences from the plot of the film and construct the entire story. Our aim is to analyze the discursive strategies (lexical) of the English audiodescribed screenplay for the construction of the characters in the film Little Miss Sunshine (2006), observing the interaction between the audio described text, the image and the dialogues. In order to do so, we will adapt the labels proposed by Jiménez (2007) that, based on a corpus analysis of two hundred and ten audiodescribed films, suggests an amount of labels of semantic categories that could be useful as epistemological and linguistic principles to the grammar of audiodescribed texts. Our analysis is going to be based on these categories, referring to the non verbal visual elements that concern the physical aspects, as well as the emotional states of the characters, whenever those are relevant mechanisms of inference for the comprehension of the narrative. First, we will transcribe the English audio description, and then label the audio described screenplay, observing the frequency of the categories and the recurrence of each one. Finally, we will analyze in which ways the discursive strategies of the audiodescribers may have influenced the process of construction of the characters in the film.

Renata MASCARENHAS holds a Master in Applied Linguistic from the State University of Ceará. At the moment, she is taking a PhD course at the Federal University of Bahia and writing a thesis on the audiodescription of Brazilian TV series. Since 2008, and as a member of the research group TRAMAD (Tradução, Mídia e Audiodescrição), she has participated in the audio description of the dance performance Os 3 audíveis, she has audio described some conferences at the Second State Conference of the Impaired People's Rights and written the audio described screenplay of a film for a dubbing company.