Audio Description on the Thought-Action Continuum

Palmer, Alan Warwick; Salway, Andrew

doi:10.5325/style.49.2.0126

Cited by 5 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…from the chart data, we can infer that information about the characters' mental dimension is primarily conveyed through descriptions that fall midway on the continuum, namely descriptions modified with an adverb, troponym, or phrase, which make up 58 percent in total. this finding is consistent with that of Palmer and Salway (2015), who observed a general tendency towards these kinds of descriptions in audio description for british film and tv. this suggests that describing the mental dimension of characters usually entails some form of interpretation on the part of the audio describer, because (s)he has to render the implicit visual elements into an explicit verbal form, and therefore infers the underlying meaning while at the same time still staying true to what can be seen on screen (i.e., the actions).…”

Section: Degree Of Interpretationsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…to confirm this hypothesis, we calculated how often thought descriptions across all categories are conveyed through action verbs and found that -whether through the use of a single verb, a verb plus an adverb, or a figure of speech -81 percent of all 400 thought descriptions in the corpus is described in this manner. this finding seems to corroborate Palmer and Salway's (2015) argument against the supposedly clear-cut dichotomy between a character's mental state and the physical characteristics which reflect that state.…”

Section: Analyzing the Audio Description Of The Characters' Mental DIsupporting

confidence: 72%

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Audio describing the mental dimension of narrative characters. Insights from a Flemish case study.

Geerinck¹,

Vercauteren²

2020

Punctum.

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Audio description (AD) is a service for people with sight loss that makes audiovisual content such as films and TV series accessible to them by verbally describing the visual elements they cannot access. This form of intermodal translation entails various challenges. One of them is how to render orally the emotions, feelings, and other mental states of narrative characters, i.e., elements that we infer from concrete actions, facial expressions, and gestures shown on screen. In practice, we can use various strategies, situated on a continuum ranging from an objective ‘describe what you see’ approach to more interpretative, subjective descriptions, explicitly naming the mental state underlying the visuals. Although early AD guidelines recommend objective descriptions, recent research has indicated that more subjective approaches may offer various advantages to target audiences in terms of immersion in the story world or imposed cognitive load. In this paper, we present the results of a case study involving the analysis of three episodes from different Dutch-spoken TV series to explore a) what strategies audio describers use to express mental states and b) where do they stand on the objective-subjective continuum. The results show that, contrary to what the guidelines recommend, the descriptions are situated nearer the subjective side of the continuum, suggesting that, when translating visual elements into a verbal form, audio describers tend to look beyond the screen to infer the implicit underlying meaning.

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Section: Degree Of Interpretationsupporting

confidence: 92%

Section: Analyzing the Audio Description Of The Characters' Mental DIsupporting

confidence: 72%

Audio describing the mental dimension of narrative characters. Insights from a Flemish case study.

Geerinck¹,

Vercauteren²

2020

Punctum.

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“…AD makes the visual images of theater, media, and visual art accessible for people who are blind or have low vision (Snyder, 2014). In the context of this study, AD refers to the spoken commentary that is added to film soundtracks to enable VI to follow scenes and actions on the screen to provide supplementation in the appropriate parts of the media such as soundtracks and after the necessary noise cues (Braun, 2008; Palmer & Salway, 2015). Using expressions that are succinct, vivid, and imaginative via the use of similes or comparisons, describers convey visual images that are either inaccessible or only partially accessible to VI.…”

Section: Audio Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of audio description on film comprehension of individuals with visual impairment: A case study in Turkey

uulu¹,

Şimşek

Antonova-Ünlü

2021

British Journal of Visual Impairment

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The present study aimed to investigate the extent to which audio description contributes to the visually impaired individuals’ comprehension of a film by examining the visually impaired and sighted participants’ comprehension of two versions of the same film, one with and the other without supplementary audio description. The results of the study showed that the visually impaired participants were able to comprehend and narrate the events to the same extent as the sighted participants did when the film was supplemented with audio description. The qualitative analysis validated this finding and demonstrated that the visually impaired participants were able to comprehend the film to a great extent with the assistance of audio description. These findings emphasized the role of audio description assistance and its effects as an important resource in converting visual information to vocal information, which greatly aids the visually impaired individuals’ film comprehension. Also, the use of “Causal Network Model” showed that understanding the plot better could enable the audio description creators to provide better assistance for the visually impaired if they applied this model.

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“…This kind of shift was accounted for by the narratologist Alan Palmer in his conceptualization of a 'Thought-Action Continuum', exemplified by the difference between the statements 'a person stands behind a curtain' and 'a person hides behind a curtain' (Palmer 2004). Palmer and Salway (2015) analyzed audio description -a verbal account of visual information provided for partially-sighted and blind audiences -in terms of the thought-action continuum by looking at how action descriptions were modified with extra words around verbs, and at how troponyms of generic verbs were used. This approach was our starting point in order to look for instances of interpretation/ evaluation in the BMSatire Descriptions corpus, as reported in Sections 3.2.1 and 3.2.2.…”

Section: Curatorial Interpretation/evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating Curatorial Voice with Corpus Linguistic Techniques

Salway

Baker

2020

Mus. Soc.

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We seek to demonstrate how corpus linguistic techniques can facilitate a comprehensive account of curatorial voice in a large digitised museum catalogue and hence leverage its value as a resource for generating new knowledge about: curatorial practice; the historical and cultural contexts of curation; and, the content of collections. We worked with 1.1 million words written by the historian M. Dorothy George between 1930 and 1954 to describe 9330 late-Georgian satirical prints. George’s curatorial descriptions were analysed in terms of their typical informational content and with regards to the extent George included interpretation and evaluation in her descriptions. We discuss how results from such analyses can provide a basis for addressing questions about George’s curatorial voice and, more generally, suggest how this approach could benefit museological practice around the production of descriptions and the re-purposing of legacy catalogues for digital access and analysis of collections.

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Audio Description on the Thought-Action Continuum

Cited by 5 publications

References 9 publications

Audio describing the mental dimension of narrative characters. Insights from a Flemish case study.

Audio describing the mental dimension of narrative characters. Insights from a Flemish case study.

The effect of audio description on film comprehension of individuals with visual impairment: A case study in Turkey

Investigating Curatorial Voice with Corpus Linguistic Techniques

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