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Abstract
In the wake of pioneering countries such as the United Kingdom, a second wave of countries is now starting to provide AD. Although AD is relatively new we can say that it has already acquired some form of ‘tenure’ within the broader field of Audiovisual Translation (AVT). AD bears some obvious resemblances with other forms of text production and other AVT practices more specifically. However, AD also differs from other forms of AVT in significant ways, the actual nature of the (intersemiotic) translation process being an essential example. But while AD in itself starts to get ever more attention from translation scholars, the interlingual translation of existing audio descriptions is almost completely absent in AVT practice and research. Therefore the aim of the present article is to take a first look at some of the problems translators of audio descriptions are faced with. Are these problems different from translation problems that they would encounter in other translational contexts? And if they are not, might this mean that the translation of audio descriptions is more central to the core business of TS and AVT studies than AD proper? These are the main questions that will be considered in this article.
Notes
1. AD and SDH make audiovisual texts accessible for visually and aurally impaired viewers respectively. Both target groups constitute heterogeneous communities that are sometimes seen as having developed a ‘culture’ of their own. Especially people who have been born blind or have become blind at an early age will experience the world around them in a way that is difficult for sighted people to imagine. People who are congenitally deaf actually constitute a distinct cultural community (Neves, Citation2009). In making audiovisual texts accessible, AD and SDH help their audiences bridge a cultural gap in a way that is comparable to the manner in which interlingual subtitling helps audiences from different cultural and linguistic communities access foreign language productions.
2. Henceforth we will refer to the person writing the initial audio description as ‘the describer’ and to the person translating the audio description as ‘the translator’. Besides, we will use the abbreviation ‘AD’ to refer to audio description as a process, and use the term ‘audio description(s)’ to indicate the individual product(s).
3. This is not to say that audio describing films has no affinities with other forms of AVT. Subtitlers, for instance, also work within time and space constraints, but the immediate source text that they have to edit and reduce, basing themselves on selection procedures, is of a verbal nature. This type of selection is the topic of well-established guidelines and numerous, equally established (international) subtitling courses and research publications.
4. In some contexts this may offer an additional advantage, since the person who translates the AD could at the same time create the (audio) subtitles, for instance, if these are not yet available, or adapt existing subtitles for audio subtitling (Augustijnen, Citation2009; Braun & Orero, Citation2008). Audio subtitling is a topic that is closely related to the translation of AD, but one that will have to be the subject of a subsequent study.
5. Ontwerp van decreet betreffende de radio-omroep en televisie, stuk 2014 (2008–2009), Amendement N°. 1, proposed by Ms Helga Stevens, Mr Bart Caron, Ms Margriet Hermans, Mr Carl Decaluwe and Mr Kurt De Loor.
6. Four Dutch films have now been audio described for the cinema and for DVD, (Zwartboek, Verhoeven, 2006; Blind, van den Dop, 2007; Bride flight, Sombogaart, 2008; and Oorlogswinter, Koolhoven, 2008), and more are on their way.
7. With thanks to Mereijn van der Heijden of Soundfocus, the Netherlands.
8. We consider the source AD as a pivot translation rather than a template or genesis file (Orero, Citation2007, p. 114) since the AD was not purposefully produced as a source text for further translation.
9. Two examples are Bourne and Jiménez's (Citation2007) comparison of the English and Spanish audio description of The hours, and Rodríguez's (Citation2007) analysis of the use of literary language in audio description.
10. ZB refers to Zwartboek (Black Book) and B refers to Blind.
11. It can be used as a conjunction , a preposition and an adverb as shown in the following examples from MacMillan (2002):
As I was leaving, the phone rang.
He works as a waiter.
Nylon is cheaper than leather, and it's just as strong.
12. The word counts have been carried out on the electronic AD scripts and include the numbering of the scenes that have been described, as well as in- and out-times, and a few other bits of text that do not belong to the AD proper. However, the amount of non-AD text is quite similar in the two descriptions under investigation.
13. Zwartboek is a historic film with concrete references to known events that took place in the Netherlands towards the end of World War 2. Blind takes place in a much less concrete, sometimes dreamlike environment.
14. Even in a case study based on two films, we found differences with respect to sentence length.
15. Indeed, none of the translation challenges discussed in this article is ‘new’ to either TS or AVT, nor is the fact that a good source text (a good audio description in this case) is easier to translate. This means that better AD training would no doubt facilitate the translation of audio descriptions and that if we train students in both, this should yield more efficiency and quality on both fronts. However, this will have to be the topic of an other article.