Audio Describing an Animated Film: Challenges of a Master’s Degree Final Practical Project

Abstract

Audio description (AD) is a growing arts and media assistive service “that makes audiovisual products accessible and enjoyable for the blind and visually impaired by transferring images and unclear sounds into a verbal narration that interacts with the dialogues and sounds of the original text with which it forms a coherent whole” (Reviers and Vercauteren 2013 in Vercauteren 2016: 11). As an object of study and as an intersemiotic, intersemiospherical or intermodal practice, audio description has become a major area of ??interest not only in audiovisual translation, but also in translation studies (Taylor and Perego 2022). This interest goes hand in hand with technological developments in the translation industry which mirror some global trends, among which the increasing need for audiovisual localization (translation) (Bussey 2019: online).

In this article, we present an overview and reflect on our final project as a student enrolled in the Master's in Audiovisual Translation: Localization, Subtitling and Dubbing offered by ISTRAD, Instituto Superior de Estudios Lingüísticos y Traducción, and the University of Cadiz in Spain. More specifically, the project involved audio describing the animated film Pour la France, an end-of-studies history-themed film in 2D animation, produced in 2019 by Vincent Chansard, as part of the diploma Concepteur et réalisateur de films d'animation at Gobelins, École de l'image. After having defined our theoretical framework, we present our methodology based on the main steps in the preparation of an audio description project, by highlighting the various challenges that we encountered as well as the solutions we proposed.