Audio description as a verbal and audio technique of recapturing films

Audio description (AD) is a subdiscipline of audiovisual translation, characterized by many difficulties as well as many opportunities. People with visual disabilities form a very diversified audience not only because of the nature and degree of their visual impairment, but also due to their diverse needs and preferences concerning AD. Taking into consideration an opinion that in a movie visual means of expression coexist and intermingle with the music, dialogues and sounds effects, giving to the images a specific readability, we can assume that a word – the main tool of AD – should replace the visual aspects of the movie, harmonizing in the same time with all sounds of the movie. Detailed analysis of the word and its image in the AD sound tends to show the AD as a selective showing narration, a model of which is determined by the type of film and its means of expression. In turn, the manner of its reception is determined by the age, experience and habits of the blind. The task of audio description is to give a description of the image that will deepen and clarify the sounds that occur in the movie, forming together a kind of a narrative story. Therefore telling the story remains the responsibility of the author of the movie, and not of the creator of the AD script who, like any other translator, should be almost unnoticeable.