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Chapter 8. Opera audio description in the spoken-written language continuum

Abstract

Corpus linguistics research on audio description (AD) – the verbal rendering of visual information generally targeted at people with visual impairment – has focused on film and museums. The present corpus gathers opera AD scripts from the Liceu opera house (Bacelona) and Teatro Real (Madrid), and sorts them into four subcorpora, two devoted to AD throughout the performance and two comprising audio introductions (AI). I set to interrogate where opera AD falls in the spoken-written language continuum. The results suggest that all subcorpora are of a high lexical density, and in terms of lexical variation, the standardised type-token ratio remains below 50%. The mean sentence and word length, and the Flesch-Szigriszt readability results lead us to place the AIs closer to written language than ADs.

Abstract

Corpus linguistics research on audio description (AD) – the verbal rendering of visual information generally targeted at people with visual impairment – has focused on film and museums. The present corpus gathers opera AD scripts from the Liceu opera house (Bacelona) and Teatro Real (Madrid), and sorts them into four subcorpora, two devoted to AD throughout the performance and two comprising audio introductions (AI). I set to interrogate where opera AD falls in the spoken-written language continuum. The results suggest that all subcorpora are of a high lexical density, and in terms of lexical variation, the standardised type-token ratio remains below 50%. The mean sentence and word length, and the Flesch-Szigriszt readability results lead us to place the AIs closer to written language than ADs.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Cross-linguistic research and corpora 1
  4. Chapter 1. Light Verb Constructions as a testing ground for the Gravitational Pull Hypothesis 12
  5. Chapter 2. Light Verb Constructions in English-Spanish translation 34
  6. Chapter 3. Reporting direct speech in Spanish and German 51
  7. Chapter 4. “Ich bekomme es erklärt” 67
  8. Chapter 5. Exploring near-synonyms through translation corpora 91
  9. Chapter 6. run away! 108
  10. Chapter 7. Film dialogue synchronization and statistical dubbese 124
  11. Chapter 8. Opera audio description in the spoken-written language continuum 142
  12. Chapter 9. Using a multilingual parallel corpus for Journalistic Translation Research 157
  13. Chapter 10. Domain-adapting and evaluating machine translation for institutional German in South Tyrol 179
  14. Chapter 11. Word alignment in the Russian-Chinese parallel corpus 195
  15. Chapter 12. Building corpus-based writing aids from Spanish into English 216
  16. Index 235
Corpus Use in Cross-linguistic Research
This chapter is in the book Corpus Use in Cross-linguistic Research
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.113.08her

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Cross-linguistic research and corpora 1
  4. Chapter 1. Light Verb Constructions as a testing ground for the Gravitational Pull Hypothesis 12
  5. Chapter 2. Light Verb Constructions in English-Spanish translation 34
  6. Chapter 3. Reporting direct speech in Spanish and German 51
  7. Chapter 4. “Ich bekomme es erklärt” 67
  8. Chapter 5. Exploring near-synonyms through translation corpora 91
  9. Chapter 6. run away! 108
  10. Chapter 7. Film dialogue synchronization and statistical dubbese 124
  11. Chapter 8. Opera audio description in the spoken-written language continuum 142
  12. Chapter 9. Using a multilingual parallel corpus for Journalistic Translation Research 157
  13. Chapter 10. Domain-adapting and evaluating machine translation for institutional German in South Tyrol 179
  14. Chapter 11. Word alignment in the Russian-Chinese parallel corpus 195
  15. Chapter 12. Building corpus-based writing aids from Spanish into English 216
  16. Index 235
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