Museum accessibility through translation. A corpus study of pictorial audio description

In this paper, museums are defined as interactive and multimodal communicative events and it is argued that they have to widen their scope of action and acknowledge that the accessible exhibition event should be a focus of study for linguists, educators, translators, interpreters, sociologists, and mediators. These experts, in their respective fields, need to work together towards the shared goal of making the museum an interactive social agent with multiple functions that will ultimately lead to inclusion and universal accessibility. Audiovisual translation can help museography attain this objective. After discussing a set of theoretical premises based on the analysis of multimodal discourse and proposing that such texts should be made accessible for different groups of receivers, the paper then suggests a theoretical framework for the analysis of the museum as source text and of the product of its translation. This framework is applied to a corpus of museum audio descriptions in which the local grammars of two textual subtypes are compared: pictorial audio descriptions for the visually impaired and audio guides for visitors with normal vision for the same artworks.