Audio description in different languages: a contrastive analysis of the English and Chinese Titanic audio descriptions

Abstract

Since its advent, audio description (AD) has been closely linked to audiovisual translation (AVT) (Kruger & Orero, 2010). It has also been situated at the intersection of inters miotic translation (Díaz-Cintas, 2005), interlingual translation, and intralingual translation (Yan & Luo, 2019). The past decades have witnessed the broad studies of AD in script translation (Jankowska, 2015), auteur description (Szarkowska, 2013), and various guidelines (Rai et al., 2010). Nowadays, AD services in many Western countries have matured with well-established guidelines, such as the ITC guidance (2000), the ADC standards (2009), and the ACB guidelines (2010). The development of AD in China has lagged, research on film AD is scarce, and there is not yet a well-developed guideline to unify AD production (Liu & Tor-Carroggio,2022). This research is mainly based on a designed Titanic labeling scheme containing visual elements and AD specificities. The Chinese and English versions of the Titanic AD are selected as subjects to compare the AD production strategies of the two languages. And those strategies are also considered under the integration of three AD guidelines, which are the U.K. ITC guidance (2000), the U.S. ADC standards (2009), and the U.S. ACB guidelines (2010). This study employs a combination of two research methods: the quantitative method and the qualitative method. This paper identifies and compares the similarities and differences between the Titanic ADs in Chinese and English, followed by the usage of the Corpus tool (AntConc) to verify initial findings for statistical purposes. And by analyzing the concordance of the Titanic ADs with the three guidelines, suggestions are made for enhancing the quality of Chinese AD production and for the establishment of AD guidelines in China.