Culture and coherence in the Pear Tree Project

Abstract

The following article deals with the question of transferring cultural phenomena in multilingual audio description (AD). The research is based on film description material from the Pear Tree Project (PTP). Identifying cultural phenomena in audio description is a prerequisite for deciding whether an existing AD for a film or DVD is ‘translatable’ or whether it needs to be newly created for each language and culture separately.

Extending beyond lexical and grammatical issues, the article raises the question of how non-verbal cultural issues influence the coherence of an AD. This problem has been little discussed in AD research literature.

Based on the methodological translation triad, as discussed in Gerzymisch-Arbogast (1998), we suggest that background cultural knowledge can be made transparent. We will show that differing cultural assumptions may lead to coherence gaps and demonstrate by individual hypotheses how these coherence gaps may be bridged. This may strengthen the argument that translating an AD into another language is inadequate from a cultural point of view.

Keywords:

• audio description (AD)
• Pear Tree Project (PTP)
• translation methodology
• coherence
• culture

Notes

1. The project was based on Wallace Chafe's experiment on reception of visual information from 1975. For more information on the experiment, see Chafe (1980). The film on which both the original experiment and the current project were based is accessible at: http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/chafe/pearfilm.htm. A detailed film description can be found in Chafe (1980, pp. xiii–xiv).

2. ‘Holistic’ is understood here as a technical term, as described in Gerzymisch-Arbogast & Mudersbach (1998, p. 340). The concept will be explained later in the article.

3. See also Gutt (2000).

4. On average 14 times in 11 of the 12 German texts, which corresponds to 1.16 times per text, or 91% of the participants, compared to 1.4 times per text in the English texts, or 100% of the participants.

5. For more details, compare Gerzymisch-Arbogast & Mudersbach (1998, p. 63 ff) and Gerzymisch-Arbogast (2008).

6. Details of this holon have partly been extracted from the following expert literature: Bierhoff (1988), Derlega & Grzelak (1982).