Iwona Mazur and Agnieszka Chmiel

From audio description research to audio description training: Insights from the ADLAB PRO Project

Audio description (AD) is a type of intersemiotic translation whereby images – be they dynamic (in a film, a theater play or a sports event) or static (a painting or a sculpture) – are translated into words for the benefit of blind and partially sighted persons. This type of multimodal transfer has seen exponential growth over the last decade or so, which has led to the emergence of a new profession of the audio describer. This, in turn, created a need to provide professional training to those who wish to pursue such a career.

The aim of ADLAB PRO – a three-year European project involving partners from Belgium, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, and the UK – is to develop the professional profile of the audio describer, delineating training proposals for different types of AD and, ultimately, preparing AD training materials that will be available to all interested parties. In the paper we will focus on results obtained from the first Intellectual Output (IO1), which included a quantitative and a qualitative part.  The qualitative part consisted in conducting a questionnaire among 86 AD teachers, thus obtaining a snapshot of the AD training situation across Europe. In the qualitative part, on the other hand, training materials for selected AD courses were analyzed and semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with the course trainers to gain more insight into how AD is taught in different course types.

We will attempt to show how AD can be taught in line with all of Laurillard’s (2012) ingredients of an effective course and how AD training can meet the demands of modern learning models, such as situated and contextualized learning models (Risku 2002, González-Davies and Enríquez-Raído2016) and Kiraly’s emergentist model (2005, 2015). The results can be used as a reference point by all those creating curricula and by trainers willing to enrich their teaching paradigms.

Iwona Mazur, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Translation Studies, Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. Her research focuses on audio description. She has participated in a number of Polish and international research projects, including an AD reception study ADVERBA, Digital Television for All Project and the ADLAB Project. Recently she has co-authored a book on audio description (Polish title: Audiodeskrypcja). She serves as Executive Board member at the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation ESIST.

Agnieszka Chmiel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Translation Studies, Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. Her research interests include: interpreting studies, lexical processing and memory in interpreting, reading in sight translation, audiovisual translation, audio description. She has 15 years of experience as a conference interpreter. She has recently co-authored a book on audio description (in Polish: Audiodeskrypcja) and co-edited a book on training conference interpreters (in Polish: Dydaktyka tłumaczenia ustnego).