“Why can’t you wear black shoes like the other mothers?” Preliminary investigation on the Italian language of audio description

Abstract

According to ITC guidelines (2000), audio description should be as objective as possible, provide only relevant information, avoid any personal judgement and patronising attitude. However, since audio description is relatively young and develops at different paces worldwide, theoretical approaches and practical applications are not homogenous. In Italy, for instance, audio description is not an academic discipline yet and initiatives aiming at increasing its use are very loosely connected. However, the amount of TV audio description is not irrelevant, nor is the yearly production by no-profit associations. The language used seems to be influenced by the relatively isolated, slow and new development of audio description in Italy, but also by its literary tradition and the ‘cultural’ attitude of professionals towards spoken and written language. Through corpus-driven analysis of an Italian and an English audio description script of the film Chocolat (L. Hallström, 2000, USA-UK), this contribution aims at drawing attention to some features of the Italian language used, i.e. on the use of a written register and of formal and typically written syntactical structures. In addition, the article challenges relevance and objectivity in the Italian AD script which, although very far from ITC principles, generally seems to meet the expectations of the Italian blind audience.