Culture doesn't travel well unless a translator is involved. Using pivot templates in audio description

As noted by Remael and Vercauteren (2010) whether and how culture references are rendered in audio description largely depends on the encyclopedic knowledge of the describer and their ability to recognize and identify the culture reference in question. In other words, unless a describer is able to single out and name a culture reference, it might be labeled incorrectly or ambiguously if not altogether omitted. In this sense, López Vera (2006, p. 9) argues that translating AD might prevent cultural loss both because "an original AD gives the appropriate cultural background and accordingly is more informative than the AD for the same film done from scratch" and because "translators are better trained to address cultural references and to adapt them to the target audience". Jankowska et al. (2017) question whether all describers are in fact equally suited to act as intercultural mediators, which is especially relevant since not all describers have educational background in translation and their AD training is not carried out within translation studies context (ADLABPRO, 2018). They also suggest that training describers in intercultural competence is essential but not sufficient since "it is perfectly feasible to raise describers’ awareness of intercultural issues, it seems impossible to expect a describer to gain intercultural competence in all cultures" (p. 3). They also suggest that when it comes to the less known cultures AD scripts could be created locally and then translated into English to avoid significant cultural loss.

This presentation explores the feasibility of using pivot templates in the AD-translation workflow to avoid cultural loss by reporting on the results of two studies. In the first one, describers from Poland were asked to write descriptions to five clips from Spanish films. In the second one, Polish AVT translators were asked to translate audio description scripts for five Spanish clips, from an English template into Polish. The templates were created based on descriptions authored in Spanish by Spanish describers. Following a common subtitling practice, the templates were time-coded and culture references were not localized but explained in annotations.

Results of a comparative analysis of the scripts show that the translated scripts retained more cultural references and contained less mistakes than the scripts created from scratch. Also, the use of description strategies and tactics differs. On the whole, the scripts written from scratch seem to be more domesticating and resort more often to generalization. As part of conclusions this presentation will reflect on the pros and cons of introducing pivot templates into audio description script production workflow and the intercultural competence of describers.