ELIANA FRANCO
LECTURE: AUDIO DESCRIPTION. ART AND CRAFT
BIO
ELIANA FRANCO holds a Doctorate degree in Letters (KULeuven, Belgium, 2000), is a specialist in Audiovisual Translation and Accessibility and has performed as a subtitler and an audio describer for over 15 years. In the year 2000, she embarked on the audiovisual accessibility path through research about subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH) on Brazilian television, and in 2004 she was introduced to audio description by Bernd Benecke (Bayerische Rundfunk). She was vice-president of ABRAPT (the Brazilian Association of Researchers in Translation) in the biennium 2008-2010. As an Associate Professor at the Federal University of Bahia, she founded and coordinated (2004-2014) the research group TRAMAD – Translation, Media and Audio description, which pioneered research about AD for the cinema and dance performances in Brazil and about AD for the audience with learning disabilities, also in Europe. Franco has published about audiovisual translation in the country and abroad and has given audio description training at major Brazilian universities (USP, UFBA, UFMA and UFRJ). She was also a member of the technical jury of the Festival of Films with Accessibility VerOuvindo, in the editions of 2017 and 2019. At present, she trains audio describers in Brazil and in Portugal and works as an accessibility consultant for Sintagma Lda. She was the coordinator of the accessible session that took place for the first time at the Film Festival Olhares do Mediterrâneo (Lisbon, November 2020).
ABSTRACT
Like any type of translation, and as a mode of intersemiotic audiovisual translation that takes place in cinemas, theatres and museums and that is mainly intended for the visually impaired audience, audio description has its principles, its own dynamics, exercised by trained and experienced professionals. The present session aims at approaching translational, practical and technical aspects of audio description, taking into account not only the role performed by each professional involved in the process of audiovisual audio describing, but also issues related to this professional´s training. Between art and craft, translating images into words requires much more than the simple definition of audio description suggests.