Narration or description: What should audio description “look” like?

Abstract

Like the various forms of audiovisual translation (AVT), ‘audio films’ are a hybrid, consisting of both the original film and an audio description (AD) inserted into it as a voice-over that provides the listener with a substitute for the visual content. According to the German guidelines, AD should be objective in order not to compromise the original work. This raises two questions: firstly, is it appropriate for the AD to be descriptive if one assumes that a feature film has a narrative structure, which is primarily represented on the level of images? And secondly, if the aesthetics of the film are essentially a function of its visual content, how can objectivity be reconciled with the stylistic and aesthetic objectives of the movie? This analysis is a contribution to the question of how sound and visual information of a feature film interact to tell a story and, as a consequence, what audio description should ‘look’ like in order to respect both the function of the original and the needs of the target audience.