Audio Description

Audio description (AD) is a narrative technique which provides complementary information regarding the where, who, what and how of any audiovisual content. It translates the visuals into words. The principal function of this ad hoc narrative is to make audiovisual content available to all: be it a guided city tour of Barcelona, a 3D film, or a Picasso painting. Audio description is one of the younger siblings of Audiovisual Translation, and it is epigonic to the audiovisual translation modality chosen. This book is the first volume on the topic written in English and it brings together an international team of leading audio description teachers, scholars, and practitioners to address the basic issues regarding audio description strategies. Using one stimulus, Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds (2009), the authors analysed what, when, where and how to audio describe. The book is written in a collaborative effort, following a bottom up approach. The many issues that surfaced in the process of the analysis were grouped in broader categories represented in the ten chapters this book contains. A good example of a successful international collaboration, the volume sets a robust practical and theoretical framework for the many studies on audio description to come in the future. Considering the structure of the individual contributions, the book is not only oriented towards the identification of the challenges that await the describer, but it also offers an insight into their possible solutions.

Irene Ranzato, Università di Roma Sapienza, in Target 28:1 (2016):
Bringing together a coherent and cohesive set of studies, this collection, edited by Anna Maszerowska, Anna Matamala and Pilar Orero, offers a rich and multifaceted exploration of audio description through the lens of a single film, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), a minefield of languages, film codes and genres. [...] This collection succeeds in giving a vivid, multifaceted but highly coherent account of the main challenges inherent to the narrative technique of audio description, one of the younger siblings of Audiovisual Translation. In this collaborative effort, international scholars review the many issues that surfaced in the process of analysing a single popular film, using a refreshingly practical bottom-up approach.