Audio description (AD) involves turning the visual content of a cultural event into verbal content and may be applied to a huge variety of settings, such as theatre, movies, television and other art forms. Audio description targets a special audience since it is primarily performed to help blind and visually impaired users. In this sense, it is not simply about describing images but also about selecting, retrieving, structuring and reformulating (both linguistically and semantically) the relevant information from the visual content in a way that the blind users can understand and enjoy.
Audio description is made for a special audience and for a special purpose, which determines the language used in it. Unfortunately, from an academic point of view, only some research has been carried out targeting AD, and focusing on limited aspects, such as how given feelings or situations are audio described to establish possible ways of (semi)automating the production of AD scripts through technology, which should make the task easier (Salway 2007). Indeed, the role that AD plays with regard to translation studies and audiovisual translation has not been sufficiently investigated.
The same can be said of how cultural issues are dealt with in different audio descriptions, made in different countries. Whether AD might be considered culture-based will constitute the main focus of this presentation, which will investigate two different audio described versions (Italian versus English) of some films containing strongly ‘culture-dependent’ scenes. We will see if and how neutrality and interpretation are balanced all through the narration in the two versions, and compare some outstandingly audio described scenes (i.e. ‘the coffee- or the tea-scene).
In so doing, we will investigate whether the linguistic choices of the audio-describing team also reflect a more general attitude of the original culture to life and to the blind community that the AD version is intended to reach. Generally speaking, Italian audio describers (so far Italy has a very short tradition in AD) also tend to express personal judgments and anticipate much more information about the visual content and the story itself than their English colleagues. This kind of approach will often be reflected in a more complex sentence structure and it mirrors the very literary Italian tradition and style.
References
Salway, Andrew (2007): “A Corpus-based Analysis of Audio Description”. In Jorge Díaz Cintas, Pilar Orero & Aline Remael (eds) Media for All: Subtitling for the Deaf, Audio Description and Sign Language. Amsterdam: Rodopi: 151-174.