Accessibility and multilingualism: an exploratory study on the machine translation of audio descriptions

Abstract

This article presents the results of an exploratory study which assesses the machine translation of audio descriptions as offering a possible solution to increase accessibility in multilingual environments. Accessibility is understood to encompass two different categories: sensorial accessibility (in this specific case, for the blind and visually impaired, who cannot access the visual content of audiovisual productions), and linguistic accessibility (for those who want to access this content in their own language). The article presents some thoughts on translation as a means of promoting multilingualism, on the feasibility of translating audio descriptions, and on machine translation as applied to this audiovisual translation mode, before summarising the findings of the present study and, most importantly, opening up new potential avenues for research.