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Translating for the Blind on Digital Platforms: Audio Description Practices in the USA and Spain. With Eva Espasa.

April 8th, 2021 (15:00 - 16:30 Boston | 21:00 – 22:30 Madrid)

Audio description (AD), “a verbal version of the visual for the benefit of people who are blind or have low vision” (Snyder 2007), is gradually more present in video on demand platforms, largely due to user pressures for a more accessible experience; however, there are significant differences across platforms, languages, and countries. This session will provide an overview of current AD practices in the US and Spain for audiovisual fiction available on digital platforms. It will briefly examine the main challenges of AD, especially in connection with the usual requirement of providing objective descriptions, and will pay special attention to how gender, linguistic, and cultural diversity are audio described in popular TV series. The talk will also explore the extent to which audiovisual globalization is compatible with local AD guidelines and discuss the implications of source-language audio description. Popular TV series such as Orange is the New Black, Unorthodox, La casa de papel, and Merlí  will serve to illustrate these points.

Eva Espasa is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Vic-Central University of Catalonia (Barcelona), where she teaches audiovisual translation and accessibility. Her main research interests are audiovisual translation, accessibility, theatre translation and gender studies, topics on which she has published extensively. She is the coordinator of the interdisciplinary research group TRACTE (Traducció Audiovisual, Comunicació i Territori) and was the principal investigator of TRAFILM, a project on the translation of multilingual films in Spain, which resulted in the publication of the volume Translating Audiovisuals in a Kaleidoscope of Languages (2019). She is presently researching the translation and audiodescription of multilingual TV series on digital platforms for the MUFiTAVi Project. 

Language: English

Online via Zoom 

RSVP: info-observatory@fas.harvard.edu

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