Reflexiones sobre el guion cinematográfico y la audiodescripción (AD): el caso de Todo sobre mi madre en español e italiano

This paper reports on the preliminary results of a contrastive analysis involving Italian and Spanish audio description (AD) scripts provided for the drama film Todo sobre mi madre (Almodóvar 1999). The fact that the Italian AD is an interlinguistic adaptation of the content and style displayed in the film screenplay – published in Spanish – has led to enquire into whether and to what extent a faithful conversion from a text type (the screenplay) to another (the AD text) provides the AD users with an enhanced reception of the audiovisual product. To this end, the Spanish and Italian AD scripts were transcribed and compared to observe the range of strategies adopted in the intersemiotic translation. The information contained in the screenplay of the film was considered both as a necessary tool to investigate the communicative intentions of the film director and as a paradigm for the evaluation of results. Data suggest that the availability of the screenplay can be of use when it comes to selecting the content and style of the AD text. Nevertheless, their belonging to different text typologies may make the audio describer’s intervention necessary in some cases.