How to deal with intertextuality in AD? Almodóvar’s "The skin I live in". A case study

In 1997, Navarrete, one of the first professional Spanish audio describers, defined audio description (AD) as ‘the art of translating images into words’. Since then, the academic, social and professional interest that this service has steadily increased. The Spanish regulation Audiodescripción para personas con discapacidad visual. Requisitos para la audiodescripción y la elaboración de audioguías (AENOR 2005) establishes the guidelines for the AD of theatre, cinema and museum guides in Spain. The guidelines state that the aim of every AD is that the receptor should perceive the audiovisual content ‘in as similar a way as possible to that perceived by a person who sees’[1] (2005: 4). In other words, the goal is to eliminate the barriers imposed by sensory impairment when enjoying an audiovisual product and to place the person with a visual impairment as close as possible to a normal viewer, having the same information and also enjoying the film in the same way. The role of the describer is both essential and complex because they have to decide which elements they want to describe, taking into consideration the time restrictions imposed by the film itself, and also determine the adequate wording to use. In this sense, the intertextual elements of a film constitute an interesting challenge for the describer. The aim of this article is to analyse the AD of the film The Skin I Live In (2011) by the La Mancha director Pedro Almodóvar, paying special attention to intertextuality. We will identify the audio described elements (and those which have been omitted in the AD) and we will determine the translation strategies used by the describer, in order to consider whether, in fact, the analysed AD puts the visually impaired receptor in a better position to understand the film, than the average viewer.