ELIANA FRANCO
TALK: AUDIO DESCRIPTION. ART AND CRAFT
BIO
ELIANA FRANCO has a Doctorate degree in Letters (KULeuven, Belgium, 2000), with a thesis on voice-over translation. She is a specialist in Audiovisual Translation and Accessibility and has worked as a subtitler and an audio describer for more than 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 into the task of audio describing 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. Eliana has published about audiovisual translation in the country and abroad and has given audio description training courses at major Brazilian universities (USP, UFBA and UFRJ), associations and production companies all over the country. She was also a member of the jury in two editions (2017 and 2019) of the Festival of Films with Accessibility VerOuvindo, in Recife, Brazil. In 2014 she moved to Germany and in 2020 decided to settle on sunny Portugal. Recently, she has joined Sintagma Lda´s team as coordinator of access services.
ABSTRACT
Like any type of translation, and as a mode of intersemiotic audiovisual translation that takes place in cinemas, theatres and museums and is targeted especially to the visually impaired audience, audio description has its principles, its rules, its own dynamics, performed by trained and experienced professionals. The present session aims at approaching practical as well as technical aspects of each type of audio description, taking into account not only the role performed by each professional in the realization process of an audio described audiovisual product, but also issues related to the training of this professional. Between art and craft, translating images into words requires much more than what the simple definition of audio description suggests.