Expression of Emotions in the Spanish and Italian Filmic Audio Descriptions of The King’s Speech

This paper puts forward a three-layered model for the analysis of linguistic items in filmic audio description (AD). The model is applied to three Spanish and Italian audio described scenes of the drama film The King’s Speech (Hooper, 2010). The aim is to evaluate lexical items that are chosen to verbalize information on characters’ emotional condition, or psyche. Verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs used in the compared ADs will be analysed taking into consideration the communicative function(s) associated with each scene. The overall objective of the research is to shed light on the linguistic strategies that could potentially be used in AD to enhance the communicative value of the audiovisual source text, guiding the choice of informative or expressive rendering in AD to foster the audience’s engagement with the narrative. Results suggest that it might be useful to identify the communicative function of a given scene; this can turn into a valuable criterion, to be given due credit when creating AD.