Creativity in audio description. Culture-specific references and emotional states across Netflix series

Over the past decades, media accessibility (MA) has gained momentum and contributed to providing greater access to audiovisual media while addressing heterogeneous audiences. This has involved a shift of MA as a subarea within audiovisual translation (AVT) devoted to a specific group of users (i.e., the deaf and the hard of hearing; the blind and visually impaired) to a field intended for anyone who might have the necessity to take advantage of intralingual and interlingual practices of translation (e.g., issues connected with age, immigration status and L2 learning, among others). Given this universalist perspective and user-centred approach (Greco 2018), creativity has become a significant intercultural strategy in Audio Description (AD) by enhancing the interpretation of culture-specific references (CSRs) and stimulating the users to have more immersive and subjective experiences (Walczak and Fryer 2017). In addition to its artistic and aesthetic function within accessibility services (Romero Fresco 2021; Soler Gallego 2021), and in line with the idea that creative practices can foster a variety of experiences relevant to diverse types of intersemiotic translation (Rizzo 2018), as well as promote inclusiveness in terms of cognition, affection, and perception (Spinzi 2019; Ramos 2015), creativity in AD scripts and in the translation of AD scripts can potentially help portray intercultural issues and the emotional states of fictional characters. In this regard, creative choices in AD-script production (intersemiotic translation) and AD-script translation (interlingual translation) can strengthen the user’s participation in meaning-making processes, while adding cultural value to the end-product (Jankowska 2021).

The focus is on the production of ADs for TV series streamed by Netflix in the period of the Covid-19 pandemic when the digital diffusion of films and TV series had a significant impact on the ever-increasing growth of audiovisual translation practices. The investigation is based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the English and Italian ADs provided for the two series, "The Irregulars" (2021) and "Bridgerton" (2020), as crime/mystery and period dramas respectively. The aim is to analyse the selected corpus of 16 audio descriptions (Seasons 1) and provide a contrasting analysis between the English and Italian versions in order to evaluate 1) the existence of creative solutions; 2) whether the existent creative (linguistic) devices are culture-bound markers and whether they adhere to the source or target audiences (foreignisation vs. domestication); 3) whether discourse sequences and markers, semantic intensity and interpersonal meanings, among others, derive from processes of interlingual translation (from English AD scripts to Italian translations) or are the result of intercultural and intersemiotic translation-related activities put into practice in the ADs produced from scratch in Italian.
Drawing upon corpus linguistics techniques (Sketch Engine 2014) for retrieving statistical information, and upon cognitive grammar (Langacker 1987/2008) and functional grammar (Halliday 2004/2014) for qualitative interpretation, for the purpose of this study, CSRs and intralinguistic culture-bound references (e.g., metaphorical markers, symbolic terms, perceptual and cognitive linguistic categories, fixed expressions and idioms) are surveyed and classified by taking into account, on the one hand, the Extralinguistic Cultural References (ECRs) strategies for AD research (Jankowska et al. 2017) and, on the other hand, by exploring what translation strategies have been employed to transform creativity into an intercultural translation device.