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The need for audio-described audiovisual content is mainly growing due to statutory accessibility required in many countries. Regrettably, despite the popular and legal demand for audio description, broadcasters and producers perceive audio description (AD) as an expensive service with little profit potential. Audio Description Translation (ADT) is an alternative production model that can reduce the time and costs involved in AD production while maintaining quality and increasing the availability of audio-described content in multiple languages. Drawing on a widespread practice of using (pivot) templates in modern subtitling workflows, this article investigates the use of pivot templates in audio description, focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of this production model as perceived by audio description translators. Data was collected in an experiment where six participants, five subtitlers, and an audio describer were asked to translate audio descriptions for Spanish films into Polish via an English pivot template. Results based on the thematic analysis of post-task interviews identify two main advantages: (1) personal advantages for the professionals performing the task and (2) external advantages that can benefit, for example, the production workflow, product, and target audience. The personal advantages are reduced time, effort, and responsibility. The external advantages are enhanced script quality and consistency.

Empowering novice describers can reduce costs and expand access to high-quality audio descriptions (ADs). This study explored differences between novice and professional practices by analysing their ADs for a 3:42-minute scene from a Japanese fictional film. A film producer rated both the overall quality and volume quality of ADs. The perceived AD volume quality reflects the comprehensive volume experience within ADs beyond loudness. The assessment revealed that ADs created by ten novices using speech synthesis reached approximately 60% of both the overall quality and volume quality of published ADs with human voice. Kernel density estimation showed significantly lower mean loudness in published ADs than in novice ADs. Additionally, a significant negative correlation existed between perceived AD volume quality and mean film loudness during AD presentation across all AD sets. However, published ADs had longer durations compared to novice ADs. Contrasting cueing strategies were observed. Published ADs relied on film sounds, whereas novice ADs leaned on visual cues. Consequently, we developed a professional technique: carefully curating the film information to be heard and balancing AD placement to ensure the audio experience of both ADs and film sound without abrupt AD loudness increases. This sonic approach empowers novices to craft impactful ADs.

“Dancing with Dharma”: making wise choices in audiovisual translation in the first Students’ Symposium “Wise Choices in AVT”. During the First Student Symposium on Audiovisual Translation, organised by the West University of Timișoara, five universities, including the University of Turin, were asked to work on the 2022 British short film “Dancing with Dharma” (Sukanya- Devika.K. Jhala). In February 2023, the students involved were asked to produce subtitles, SDH (subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing) and audio description (for the blind and visually impaired) in their mother tongue. The team decided to use the subtitling software Ooona Tools, the AD software ADauthor, and the Netflix guidelines. The final aim of the project was to promote the teaching of audiovisual translation in Universities and to evaluate the different results in various languages: Chinese, English, Hungarian, Italian and Romanian. After 5 months, the results were discussed at a conference held in Timișoara, Romania, on June 13th, 2023. In this paper, two of the Italian students involved in the project discuss the translation challenges encountered (the problem of textual fidelity and loss of information, and the translation of humour, wordplay and cultural references) and comment on the final result.

Despite the existence of audio description (AD) in China from 2005, little is known about how AD is conducted in China due to the scarcity of studies on this subject. This article, based on semi-structured interviews with six Chinese AD providers from Shanghai, Wuxi, and Guangzhou, aims to narrow this knowledge gap and present how AD is performed in Mainland China, as seen by some of the key agents involved. The interviews were conducted between April 30 and July 13, 2020, through voice calls on WeChat. Results can be grouped under the following three topics: the current state of AD in China, how AD is conducted in China, and the feasibility of AD translation from Spanish into Chinese. This study has reached two main conclusions. First, AD in China is, now, full of opportunities and challenges, with the copyright issue as its main problem and the objectivity versus subjectivity dichotomy as one of the most debatable concerns in the scriptwriting process. Second, almost all the interviewees showed a positive attitude towards the proposal of AD translation to promote this service in China, in our particular case from Spanish into Chinese.

This article examines the depiction of emotionality and the everyday GDR culture in the renowned German tragicomedy 'Good Bye, Lenin!' (2003), directed by Wolfgang Becker, which won numerous awards both nationally and internationally, and its comparation in three different forms of the film: the screen play by Bernd Lichtenberg (2003), a book adaptation in plain language by Eva Dix (2015), and a version adapted for people with visual impairment, supplemented by audio descriptions. We investigate how emotionality is manifested linguistically and with the help of which means it can differ in these three media forms, while emphasizing the role they play in the contextual representation of GDR culture. The analysis shows that linguistic and literary elements such as narrative style, culturally specific elements, intertextuality and intermediality, as well as levels of isotopia contribute to the emotional impact of the text and that the audio-described version has the highest emotional potential while the plain language version has the lowest emotional impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The CEFR (Council of Europe, 2001) and its companion volumes (Council of Europe, 2018, 2020) highlight the development of plurilingual and pluricultural competence (PPC) as one of the main objectives of language teaching and learning. Within this context, the plurilingual approach in education has placed translation in a prominent situation, with authors such as Cummins (2007) observing how it promotes not only the acquisition of foreign languages (FL) and the consolidation of L1s, but also biliteracy development and identity affirmation. Within translation, audiovisual translation (AVT) has proven to be particularly effective in language learning (cf. Lertola, 2019). The polysemiotic nature of audiovisual texts incorporates elements that require the activation of specific forms of mediation that cannot always be found in general translation. This article sets out to reflect on the influence that linguistic and semiotic transfer in AVT can exert on PPC (Author, 2021), drawing on the results of a quasi-experimental research undertaken within the PluriTAV project (cf. Martínez-Sierra, 2021). This specific study was aimed at assessing the development of PPC through audio description (AD) in BA English undergraduate students, who were organised into an experimental and a control group, with only the former using AD as a didactic tool. Although results do not reveal a statistically significant improvement in PPC acquisition, they enable the formulation of hypotheses to be tested in further research. In addition, the experimental group showed some progress in the development of specific plurilingual and pluricultural skills, which suggests that the use of AD in the FL classroom can improve learners’ plurilingual and pluricultural repertoire.

Over the last two decades, the active engagement of learners through didactic Audiovisual Translation (AVT) in Foreign Language Learning (FLL) has been receiving increasing attention from both scholars and teachers. Most AVT modes — subtitling, dubbing, audio description (AD), subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH) and voice-over — can be employed as didactic resources in FLL and guidelines are available for practitioners (Talaván, 2013, 2020). Empirical research has focused on the benefits of didactic AVT on individual and integrated language skills both in face-to-face and online contexts, English being the main language involved in the pedagogical tasks of most experimental studies (Lertola, 2019). Recently, a related long-term project, TRADILEX (Audiovisual Translation as a Didactic Resource in Foreign Language Education), led by the TRADIT research group at the UNED, has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. The main aim of TRADILEX is to evaluate the degree of FLL improvement in terms of communicative and mediation language skills thanks to the use of didactic AVT tasks. With this purpose, a carefully designed methodological proposal, which includes lesson plans on diverse AVT modes (i.e. subtitling, voice-over, dubbing, AD and SDH), is being piloted with B1 and B2 level English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in non-formal educational contexts, in university language centers all over Spain. Teachers play a key role in TRADILEX as they are specifically-trained facilitators of the learning process. Many teachers believe that AVT tasks could be integrated in the foreign language curriculum if proper teacher training is provided (Alonso-Pérez and Sánchez-Requena, 2018). However, it should be noted that teacher training has been largely neglected in the literature (Lertola, forthcoming). Within this context, this paper will present an online teacher training experience on didactic AVT carried out as a pilot study of TRADILEX, involving 12 FL secondary-school in-training teachers at a higher institution in Switzerland. The one-day teacher training was aimed at introducing future teachers to the pedagogical use of AVT tasks by presenting and working with both a dubbing and an AD lesson plan targeted for EFL B1 and B2 level respectively. The paper will analyse and discuss the data gathered through a feedback questionnaire completed by the participants, the assessment of their AVT tasks, and structured as well as non-structured observations. Observations were collected through two ad hoc observation rubrics (one per lesson plan) filled in by the one teacher-researcher and their lecturer as only-observing teacher, as well as from a group interview and personal notes on the experience shared by the subjects taking the course. The results of this small-scale study are encouraging and call for further in-depth analysis of the role of the didactic AVT in teacher training, both for practitioners interested in using it with their students and for FL teacher training courses in general.

This article explores the resources used for expressing emotionality in audio commentaries to films adapted for blind and visually impaired viewers. The subject of the study is the 2003 film Good Bye, Lenin! directed by Wolfgang Becker. Based on an analysis of three selected scenes from the film, which contain so-called audio descriptions, and from Bernd Lichtenberg's screenplay, the analysis investigates how emotionality in the film is verbalised via audio descriptions, which means of expression are used, and whether (and to what extent) the language in the audio descriptions differs from the descriptions of the scenes in the screenplay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audio description (AD) is an additional soundtrack in a film containing concise, verbal information about what is happening on the screen. The language of the AD should be appropriate to the genre of the film lexically and stylistically. This means that the language of AD in film comedies should contain some verbal ‘signals’ of the comic as an aesthetic category. The author of the presented research has attempted to analyse lexical and stylistic means of conveying situational comic and character comic as the two main types of comic, apart from the verbal one expressed directly in the characters’ speech. The material for the research included the following Soviet film comedies: We are from jazz (directed by K. Shakhnazarov, 1983), Autumn marathon (directed by G. Daneliya, 1979), and The twelve chairs (directed by L. Gaidai, 1971). The analysis proved that the verbal track of the AD reflects the most important peripeteia of the characters, and together with them the features of the characters (appearance, character traits), the manner of their behaviour. The set of llinguistic and stylistic means is determined by the type of the comedy.

In classic communication, emotion is transferred via three channels: verbal, nonverbal and paraverbal. With the audio description, which should enable blind and visually impaired people to perceive visual processes, the visual channel is omitted. Emotions are objectified using the available linguistic and para-linguistic means. On the basis of the corpora of the German-language audio films, relevant forms and forms of emotion transfer in the audio description are analyzed.

Çeviri ve toplumsal cinsiyet arasındaki ilişki son yıllarda giderek artan bir ivmeyle önem kazanmış ve alanda yapılan çalışmaların sayısı ve niteliği artış göstermiştir. Bunun sonucu olarak feminist çeviri araştırmaları diye bir alt alanın varlığından söz edilmektedir. Görsel-işitsel çeviri alt alanında toplumsal cinsiyet odaklı çalışmaların yer alması ise 2000’leri bulmuştur. Sesli betimleme, bir görsel-işitsel ürünün görsel kanalına erişimi olmayan görme engelli kişilerin erişimini sağlamak için geliştirilmiş bir görsel-işitsel çeviri türüdür. Günümüzde, bu çeviri türü, görsel-işitsel ürünlerin yaygınlaşmasıyla ve paylaşımının hızlanmasıyla önem kazanmıştır. Söz konusu çalışma feminist çeviri araştırmaları ve görsel-işitsel çeviri gibi iki çağdaş alt alanın kesişiminde yürütülmüştür. Çalışmanın amacı Türkiye’de sesli betimlemeyi en yaygın olarak uygulayan kurum olan SEBEDER’den (Sesli Betimleme Derneği) alınan veri ve dönütlerden yola çıkarak sesli betimleme alanında çalışanların, sesli betimleme metin yazarlarının veya seslendirmenlerin “cinsiyeti” üzerinden bir okuma yapabilmektir. Alıcılar açısından, sesli betimlemede “kadın seslendirmenin sesi” ve hatta “kadın sesli betimleme metin yazarının seslendirilen söylemi” gayet açık bir şekilde hissedilmektedir. Diğer çeviri türlerine kıyasla bu bağlamda “kadın çevirmen” göz ardı edilemez bir şekilde ürünün bir parçasıdır -sesi duyulmaktadır. Bu da bu alanda kadın sesine dair bulgulara gebe bir araştırma platformu sağlar. Söz konusu çalışmada bu alanda istatistiki bilgilere ve alıcı tercihlerine yer verilmekte ve bunlar feminist görsel-işitsel çeviri araştırmaları kapsamında ele alınarak yorumlanmaktadır.

Media accessibility is becoming mainstream. While it cannot compete for popularity with the two original fields –architecture and design accessibility– it is slowly gaining acknowledgment. Subtitling was and still is the most popular media access service. In recent years, more services have been joining the alternative possibilities to access information. New technologies have also increased the number of services, and Easy to Read is proposed in this article as a new candidate to join the list of services. This article will start by describing Easy to Read, and understand its approach as: a translation modality, a linguistic variation or as a service. The second part of the article presents many accessibility services and Easy to Read features. In the third part, new hybrid services are proposed. These are the result of adding to existing access services a layer of Easy to Read creating a higher degree of accessibility. Any accessibility service aiming to facilitate comprehension will improve and optimize its function by leaning on Easy to Read. The article finishes offering many examples to secure a rapid uptake of the service across the different accessibility fields, from design to web accessibility or transport.

Intersemiotic poetics and teaching literature The article is devoted to intersemiotic poetics derived from the theory of translation, that is the principle of translation described by Roman Jakobson (the interpretation of linguistic signs by means of non-verbal signs). From the reconstruction of research stances, changes in the concepts of the mind, and a new understanding of the processes of perception and metaphor, the Author relates the mechanisms of intersemiotic translation to borderline forms (ekphrasis and audio description) and the principles of teaching. By analyzing selected examples (Jacek Kaczmarski’s ekphrasis and editorial notes to Wisława Szymborska’s poem Utopia), she proves that after rejecting the principles of equivalence and similarity, while simultaneously maintaining the principle of causality, one may look for affinities in deeper semantic layers (amplification, addition) or engage in teaching literature, where intellectual precision is related to the shaping of emotions and skills involved in the multisensual reading of cultural texts.

There is no doubt that Translation Studies have firmly established themselves as an independent scientific field. However, there are thematic overlaps in some areas concerning other disciplines. This work investigates the relations between interlinguistic translation and intersemiotic translation from the point of view of translation studies. First of all, a set of criteria for the identification of proper translation is offered and, in a second step, we examine how theoretical elements like communicative equivalence and communicative value can be transferred to a linguistic discourse by means of the intersemiotic translation modality known as audio description (AD). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study is a theoretical and practical reflection on an innovative teaching project (DESAM, Development of Content for a Universal Platform System on the Description, Location and Guide to University of Granada), carried out by the Department of Translation and Interpretation. This project started a new line of innovative teaching and research in which we analyze the main factors acting in this pairing Culture and Translation: teacher, students, and context. The two principle objectives of the project were to apply the different modes of accessible translation to the context of cultural heritage, and to create a multimodal educational space for students of Translation and Interpreting in order to encourage their self-learning and facilitate the assimilation of ideas developed in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]