A Tiered Vocabulary System for Audio Description

Building Up Cinematic Jargon in Audio Introductions

Abstract

In film audio description (AD), cinematic jargon is a fundamental component to portray the director’s perspective and deliver an enriched cinematographic experience to the audience (Perego, 2014). Even though academia has partially tackled aspects related to how audio describers should approach film language (Remael et al., 2015), nothing has been said about how cinematic jargon should be arranged in the first place to offer professionals some structure to implement it effectively in their target text (TT).

In this study, we put forward a system that consists of a filmic analysis per sequence to locate technical cinematic terminology in Spanish, categorize it in tiers based upon the mainstays of vocabulary acquisition (Beck et al., 2013), and select eligible instances that fit in the cinematic audio-described script (CADS). The main objective is to establish a procedure that allows audio describers to incorporate purposeful cinematic terminology in their audio introduction (AI) and thus enhance blind and partially sighted (BPS) users’ filmic experience. Our conclusion is that this system can contribute to conveying a unified glossary for cinematic AD purposes and help optimize the opportunity to disseminate this specialized knowledge in the long run.

Lay summary

Audio description is an oral commentary that offers a verbal description of images to blind and partially sighted people. In the audio description of films, cinematic terminology is fundamental to express the director’s perspective. Scholars have explored different aspects related to film language in audio description, but there are no studies that offer strategies to include this technical vocabulary effectively.

In this paper we propose a system that consists of an analysis to identify cinematic terminology, classify the vocabulary according to its difficulty, and select words that fit in the audio described script while it is operated with the dialogues and sounds from the film. The examples are provided in Spanish with a back translation in English. The main objective is to offer audio describers a strategy to add cinematic vocabulary to their Audio Introduction, an oral text that can be included before the film is played. If this goal is achieved, blind and partially sighted users can improve their filmic experience. In the future, we believe that our system can help create a common glossary of cinematic vocabulary for AD.