Emotional audio description

Abstract

The article aims to summarize the results of a study that pertained to a student-authored audio description of an episode of a British TV drama entitled True Love. The material was audio described for the purposes of one of a series of film shows hosted by the University of Gdańsk and offered to Blind or Visually Impaired (BVI) audiences and their sighted fellow viewers. 25 non-AD-trained translation studies students participated in the study. They were exposed to two consecutive screenings (first of the original material, then of the AD-enriched one) after which they were asked to fill out a questionnaire whose goal was to gain insight into their preferences concerning audio description of emotions in the reference material as well as to their own interpretation of emotions in nine scenes of the said episode. Goleman’s tentative classification of emotions was used as a benchmark. Additionally, a short linguistic analysis was performed to enable mapping the describers’ choices onto current AD concepts in an attempt at finding an optimal approach to describing emotions. It appears that the viewers appreciated a more direct description, involving the name of a given emotion rather than a dry description of the character’s facial expression. This is especially true in the cases in which a high variation was spotted in the respondents’ choices of lexical items describing a given emotion. It is, therefore, the more creative approaches to AD applied by the amateur audio describers that matched their expectations. These approaches, however, proved to have stirred away from the most liberal AD concepts, with no bold metaphors used in the script. Finally, directions and methods of further research into audio describing emotions were suggested.