As audiodescrições de Ensaio sobre a cegueira em inglês e português: um estudo baseado em corpus

Abstract

The research on Audiovisual Translation (AVT), particularly that focused on the notion of accessibility by means of audio description (AD), is in its infancy but has expanded significantly in recent years. Concerns with corpus-based research have been of great support to AVT studies. Aimed at contributing to these studies, this research replicates the following methodologies to analyze a corpus of ADs in English and Portuguese for the movie Blindness: Bourne & Jiménez Hurtado (2007), which focuses on AD verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and syntax; Salway (2007), which analyzes the special language of AD; and Braga (2011), which uses Jiménez Hurtados (2007) categories of action, setting, andcharacter. The study builds on a corpus methodology, particularly the Wordlist, Keywords, and Concordance programs provided in the Wordsmith Tools© 5.0suite. The AD transcripts were requested from their developers and then they were prepared and revised. In addition, the corpus was manually annotated according to categories derived from Bourne & Jiménez Hurtado (2007), Salway (2007), andBraga (2011). The research questions drew on the results presented in the aforementioned studies. The results point to a high number of verb tags, which indicates that both ADs in English and Portuguese give significant value to the description of actions. Both ADs prioritize the use of general verbs, which does not confirm Bourne& Jiménez Hurtados (2007) results as to the prominence of semantically complex verbs. However, the english- language AD tends to include this type of verb more often than the Portuguese-language AD. Furthermore, both the English and Portuguese ADs include general verbs followed by adverbs to express actions with details. The lack of highly precise and unusual adjectives in the English- language AD contradicts Bourne & Jiménez Hurtados (2007) results. Another result that contradicts the same study refers to the more detailed adjective-based descriptions in the Portuguese AD as opposed to the English AD. On the other hand, the results on adverbs confirm those reported in Bourne & Jiménez Hurtado (2007), according to whichthe AD in English tends to have adverbs without equivalents in the Portuguese AD. Regarding the special language of the ADs, this study corroborates the results found in Salway (2007), confirming that there is a high incidence of non-grammatical words in the list of the top 100 most frequent words. Moreover, the non-grammatical words in both languages fit the categories created by Salway (2007). The results as to the number of tags confirmed Bragas (2011) study, which points to a greater frequency of action tags.