Miscellaneous published in:
Audiovisual Translation in Applied Linguistics: Educational perspectivesEdited by Laura Incalcaterra McLoughlin, Jennifer Lertola and Noa Talaván
[Benjamins Current Topics 111] 2020
► pp. 182–205
Studying the language of Dutch audio description
An example of a corpus-based analysis
Nina Reviers | University of Antwerp
The present paper aims to combine insights from Applied Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Multimodality Research and Audiovisual
Translation Studies in order to explore language use in a specific form of audiovisual translation, namely Audio Description
(AD) for the blind and visually impaired. It is said that the communicative function of ADs and their multimodal context have
a significant influence on the lexical, grammatical and syntactical choices describers make. This article aims to uncover
these idiosyncratic linguistic patterns by conducting a quantitative and qualitative analysis of an annotated, audiovisual
corpus of 39 Dutch films and series that have been released with AD in Flanders and the Netherlands. The paper analyses
frequency lists, keywords, part-of-speech distributions and type-token ratios statistically, and subsequently conducts a
qualitative analysis taking systemic functional linguistics as a theoretical framework. The results confirm the hypothesis
that the language of AD is idiosyncratic and highlight the most salient lexico-grammatical features characterising the
language of Dutch AD.
Keywords: audio description, corpus studies, audiovisual translation, multimodality
Published online: 12 November 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.111.ttmc.00009.rev
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.111.ttmc.00009.rev
References
References
Arma, Saveria
Bourne, Julian, and Catalina Jiménez
2007 “From the Visual to the Verbal in Two Languages: A Contrastive Analysis of the Audio Description of The Hours in English and Spanish.” In Media for All: Subtitling for the Deaf, Audio Description and Sign Language, ed. by Jorge Díaz Cintas, Pilar Orero, and Aline Remael, 175–187. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 

Braun, Sabine
Chmiel, Agnieszka, and Iwona Mazur
Fryer, Louise, and Jonathan Freeman
Gambier, Yves
Jiménez, Catalina, and Claudia Seibel
Keuleers, Emmanuel, and Marc Brysbaert
Kluckhöhn, K.
Matamala, Anna, Pilar Orero, and Laura Puigdomenech
Nuzzo, Regina
Ofcom
Orero, Pilar
Pérez-González, Luis
Remael, Aline, Gert Vercauteren, and Nina Reviers
Remael, Aline and Nina Reviers
Remael, Aline, Nina Reviers, and Reinhild Vandekerckhove
Reviers, Nina, Aline Remael, and Walter Daelemans
Reviers, Nina, and Aline Remael
Reviers, Nina
Royce, Terry D.
Salway, Andrew, Elia Tomadaki, and Andrew Vassiliou
Salway, Andrew
Sindoni, Maria G.
Van den Bosch, Busser Bertjan Antal, Sander Canisius, and Walter Daelemans