Audio description (AD) and multiple levels of meaning in films. A functionalist perspective

This paper reports on the preliminary results of a contrastive analysis of Spanish and Italian audio description (AD) scripts provided for the drama film Murder on the Orient Express (Branagh, 2017). Looking at the AD practice as a form of intersemiotic translation, the study aims at enquiring into the extent to which the linguistic choices made to transpose the visual, non-verbal signs of the film manage to convey the implicit, connotative meaning of the audiovisual source text (i.e., the film). Functionalist theories of translation were adopted as the analytic criterion for data analysis and interpretation of results. Preliminary results suggest that the choice of the linguistic items to adopt in AD may be guided by the communicative aim detected for the film scene to be audio described.