Strategies for the audio description of brand names

Colours, places, emotions and character traits in audio description of fictional TV and cinematic materials usually describe a degree of detail that is highly dependent on the parameter of the time available between dialogues or parts of dialogues. Actions and plot are thus narrated for the blind or the visually impaired with a varying degree of attention to detail, depending on the space (or rather, “time”) available. Beyond its merely professional dimension, audio description can be considered a mode of intersemiotic translation that entails a decision-making process comparable to that in other modes of audiovisual and interlinguistic translation. It is also able to incorporate a number of features typically related to the term “transcreation”: transporting “meaning” from an audiovisual system to an exclusively aural one. Transcreation is not only a semiotic operation between disparate systems, but also a key concept in marketing and advertising. Dealing with objects in audio description, and particularly with those objects that have a clear designer imprint or branding, inevitably becomes a complex matter. This article will look at the audio description of brand names in different genre films in an attempt to account for a number of possible strategies in situations where objects, and very especially those with a conspicuous commercial brand, play an integral role in the construction of cinematic scenes, or even in the plot itself. The article will examine first some readings of objects from a semiotic perspective, with special attention to the emotional and the symbolic/cognitive implications intended on the original audience and their impingement on a transnational culture of contemporary consumerism. It then will move on to analyse some of the functions that commercially branded objects play in a film, and finally will proceed to list some examples of existing techniques used to describe such objects.