Making the inaccessible accessible. A panorama of audiovisual translation, accessibility and audio description in Japan

This paper aims to shed some light on the present situation of Audiovisual Translation Studies (AVT) in Japan, as well as to serve as the initial study to look into the state of accessibility in the Japanese context, focusing particularly on audio description (AD). By drawing on Japanese, English, Spanish and Catalan sources, this paper aims to offer up-to-date information on the aforementioned topics, and to provide new points of view on AVT in the Japanese context by formulating questions that could help to promote future research in this field. Furthermore, it wants to draw attention to specific issues that arise in the context of Japanese AVT (such as Telop subtitles, supra-subtitles, the figure of the movie-teller or benshi, etc.), and to encourage further research on AD by presenting a brief qualitative analysis of an audio described scene of a movie in Japanese in order to encourage the creation of an AD guideline for Japanese. Ultimately, this paper wants to propose more lines of research within the Japanese AVT field.