An Introduction to Audio Description

A practical guide

Louise Fryer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317479208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

An Introduction to Audio Description is the first comprehensive, user-friendly student guide to the theory and practice of audio description, or media narration, providing readers with the skills needed for the effective translation of images into words for the blind and partially-sighted.

A wide range of examples – from film to multimedia events and touch tours in theatre, along with comments throughout from audio description users, serve to illustrate the following key themes:

• 
  
  

• the history of audio description

• 
  
  

• the audience

• 
  
  

• the legal background

• 
  
  

• how to write, prepare and deliver a script.

Covering the key genres of audio description and supplemented with exercises and discussion points throughout, this is the essential textbook for all students and translators involved in the practice of audio description. Accompanying film clips are also available at: https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138848177 and on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal: http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/translationstudies/.

1 Introducing audio description

DOI: 10.4324/9781315707228-1

1.1 What is audio description?

At the moment, the stage is screened from view by a black gauze. The house lights fade – all is darkness [whispering] a single beam of light picks out a young woman in a white slip. She stands, hair loose, skin pale, eyes wide and anxious. She shrouds herself in a black chador, only her face is visible. She raises one arm in front of her, concealing all but her eyes. A flash [sfx]. The gauze falls – the girl is gone.

This is how a recent production of Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, updated and translocated to Iran, began at London’s Almeida Theatre (dir. Sheibani, 2012) if you were a blind member of the audience, listening to the audio description (AD). AD (also known as video description in the USA) is a verbal commentary providing visual information for those unable to perceive it themselves. AD helps blind and partially sighted people access audiovisual media and is also used in live settings such as theatres, galleries and museums (e.g. Díaz-Cintas et al., 2007; Vocaleyes.com) as well as in architectural tours, football and cricket matches (RNIB.org.uk) and to help blind people enjoy holidays (TravelEyes-International.com).

Radio description is a recent and unusual application of AD, intended to illustrate images referred to in a radio programme and that none of the audience can see. Description has always been a feature of radio programmes but was first included specifically under the term AD in BBC Radio 4’s news follow-up programme iPM in November 2013, when an audio describer was asked to paint a couple of verbal portraits of the programme’s presenters as an auditory alternative to webcam. Although this was a tongue-in-cheek initiative, further descriptions soon followed (Fryer, 2013; 2014). Although most of these descriptions have more in common with AD of visual art than with what Sabine Braun (2007) terms ‘dynamic AD’, the AD for an early film, A Daring Daylight Burglary (Mottershaw, 1908), that was incorporated into the radio documentary The First Action Movie (Byrnes, 2014) was dynamic in that it was timed to synchronise with the changing shots of the film as well as to capture the camera points-of-view. Description of camera shots is controversial in AD and this will be returned to in Chapter 10. Why did a radio producer feel the need to ask an audio describer to make the pictures better on radio? It is hoped that the following pages will make it clear that the way a describer thinks about image, sound and words equips them with particular skills that benefit a purely auditory medium.

In the UK, around 2 million people out of a population of around 64 million rely more on sound than most people do because they have impaired vision (RNIB, 2015a). There are thought to be 30 million blind and partially sighted people in Europe as a whole (European Blind Union, 2015), 21 million in the USA and 285 million globally (World Health Organization, 2014). Precise figures are hard to come by. This is not surprising, as in many countries there is no legal obligation to register as blind and there are widely varying definitions of blindness. The diverse characteristics of the AD audience are discussed in Chapter 4.

Agnieszka Szarkowska (2011: 142) points out that ‘audio description can refer to both product and process’. This book includes discussion of both; however, it will refer to the finished product as the description and the process as describing. Those who carry out the process are called audio describers, or just describers for short. This term may embrace the person who writes the AD script or the person who reads it. Sometimes these persons are one and the same. At other times they are two different people, with one person writing the script and the reading part being given to a professional voice-over artist, or a machine using text-to-speech software (TTS). However, those writing the description must always bear in mind that the script will be delivered orally, even if it is read out by an electronic voice. Unlike most translation texts, AD is always written for a listener, not a reader. This is discussed more fully in Chapters 5, 6 and 7, as the way AD is received affects the way the AD script is both written and delivered.

In the UK, the practice of AD in theatre and for AV media proliferated during the late 1980s and 1990s. AD for TV is now a legal requirement in the UK and has been since 1996 (Broadcasting Act, 2003; Communications Act, 1996; Equality Act, 2010). In that time, its methods have evolved and they are still evolving. In 2007, Elaine Gerber believed them to be still largely untested (Gerber, 2007). This is changing as a result of academic interest and an increasing number of reception studies. As an emerging discipline, AD is taught most commonly at postgraduate level in university departments of translation.

1.2 Audio description within audiovisual translation

AD is increasingly recognised as a constituent part of audiovisual translation (AVT) and complements subtitling for people who are deaf, deafened or hard of hearing (SDH) by providing access to AV media for people who are blind or partially sighted (BPS). AVT refers to the translation of all audiovisual products, including feature films, documentaries, television (TV) programmes and online content – in other words, the corpus of source material covered under the umbrella term ‘screen translation’ (Karamitroglou, 2000: 3). Karamitroglou cites Gambier’s list of AVT products, which comprises subtitling, simultaneous subtitling (e.g. respeaking), dubbing, interpreting (pre-recorded and consecutive), voice-over, narration, commentary, multilingual broadcast, surtitles and supratitles, and simultaneous translation – to which access practices such as signing for the deaf and AD should be added. According to Maszerowska et al. (2014: 5), ‘Audio description in Europe is a media access practice still lacking critical mass in terms of terminology, practice and training’, and they call AD ‘one of the younger siblings of AVT’ (ibid., 2014: 3). There is still much that scholarship around AD can learn from its older brothers and sisters, especially strategies used in interpreting, dubbing and subtitling.

1.3 AD within AVT

AVT students are generally surprised by audio description. Unlike subtitling, dubbing or voice-over, AD does not come with a pre-existing text that needs translating from one language to another. Rather, it has been identified by Braun (2008: 2) as ‘intersemiotic, intermodal or cross-modal translation or mediation’ (e.g. Benecke, 2004; Bourne and Jiménez Hurtado, 2007). The term ‘intersemiotic’ was coined by Jakobsen (1959) to describe types of translation in which part of the context comes from information outside the translated channel. ‘Modal’ in this context refers to modes of meaning. These include spoken, written, music and sound effects (SFX). Yet modal can also be thought of as relating to different sensory modes: namely, information received through one sense (vision) must be translated into information that can be received through another sense (audition). Joel Snyder has neatly coined the phrase ‘the visual made verbal’ (Snyder, 2014) to sum up AD. Jan-Louis Kruger also points out: ‘Audio description or narration is substantially different from other AVT modes like dubbing and subtitling, primarily because the focus in other modes is on dialogue’ (Kruger, 2012: 232). Describers must generate their script from scratch. Many translation and interpreting students find this taxing. However, others find this to be an exciting challenge, and the linguistic creativity required explains the fascination exerted by AD. Like all creative exercises, AD is governed by many constraints – which will be illuminated in the coming pages – leading Benecke (2014) to refer to it as partial or constrained translation, as the translator has only partial control over the source text (ST). The description must be fitted around the existing soundtrack, which, although its volume may be lowered for recorded media, will otherwise remain unchanged and should not be obliterated by the AD. The importance of sound is the focus of Chapter 3.

Although AD is commonly linked to subtitling, as both are means to improve access for people with a sensory impairment, potentially much stronger links have been overlooked with interpreting studies and dubbing, which, like AD, share an interest in oral delivery as the principal means of the communicative act. AD contains a performance element that has at times been overlooked by scholars in favour of the words of the AD text. Charlotte Bosseaux (2015) has attempted to correct this omission in the field of dubbing. In this book it is hoped to take such a step on behalf of AD. Delivery is discussed in Chapter 7. In contrast to AD for recorded media, AD of live events (see Chapter 2) in particular shares a similar set of factors that govern the exchange for interpreting as described by Wadensjö (1999); namely constraints provided by the technology; the field or subject matter; the tenor – role and relationships; and the mode or communication channel (Tebble, 1999). The audio describer, specifically the screen describer (at least in some countries) like the Swedish dialogue interpreter described by Wadensjö, enjoys ‘professional status, and … work regulated by an official code’. Wadensjö goes on to say: ‘The Codex states, in short, that the dialogue interpreter should only interpret i.e. relay everything said and relay what was said the way it was said … It follows along with an official principle of the interpreter’s neutrality’ (Wadensjö, 1993: 105). Metzger has debunked what she refers to as the ‘myth of neutrality’ (Metzger, 1999) for interpreting. This has yet to be done fully for AD, and the exact parameters of the subjective/objective spectrum have been an area of fierce debate. This is a debate that refuses to go away, and it will be alluded to throughout this book, and discussed more fully in Chapter 13.

1.4 Meaning making in AD

One principal concern of translation is how meaning carried through the words of one language or sign system can be conveyed through the words or signs of another (e.g. Gorlée, 1994; Remael, 2010). In AVT multiple channels or systems interact. For Gottlieb (2004), for example, multilingual subtitling is ‘diasemiotic’, requiring the translation of a verbal auditory channel (words that we hear) into a visual (verbal) channel (words that we see). SDH presumably could be seen as trisemiotic, adding in a third channel, translating from the verbal and non-verbal auditory channels to a verbal (visual) channel with the addition of visually expressed sound effects. Dubbing, being consistently auditory, is ‘isosemiotic’. Orero and Szarkowska (2014) agree with Gambier (2006) that AD should be thought of as ‘multisemiotic’, translating the visual (both verbal, such as subtitled speech or the headline of a newspaper, and non-verbal, such as an action sequence of two protagonists fighting) into spoken words.

In a recent development, AD scripts have begun to be directly translated from one language to another. So an AD script for an English source programme may be translated directly into Polish, for example, without a Polish des...