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Narration or description: What should audio description “look” like?
Mälzer-Semlinger, Nathalie
2012
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.
Publisher
EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste
Source
Nathalie Mälzer-Semlinger, "Narration or description: What should audio description “look” like?", in Elisa Perego (edited by): "Emerging topics in translation: Audio description", Trieste, EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2012, pp. 29-36.
Languages
en
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