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Audiovisual Translation in Applied Linguistics: Educational perspectives
Edited by Laura Incalcaterra McLoughlin, Jennifer Lertola and Noa Talaván
[Benjamins Current Topics 111] 2020
► pp. 181–205

Studying the language of Dutch audio description

An example of a corpus-based analysis

| 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
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Dutch AD corpus
    • 2.1Corpus design
    • 2.2Statistical processing
    • 2.3Overview of the data
  • 3.The systemic functional linguistic analysis
    • 3.1Theoretical framework
    • 3.2Analysis
      • 3.2.1Processes – verbials
      • 3.2.2Participants – nominals
      • 3.2.3Circumstances – adverbials and prepositional phrases
      • 3.2.4Lexical cohesion
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.111.ttmc.00009.rev
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