Evaluation criteria and film narrative. A frame to teaching relevance in audio description

The filmic product undergoes a process of deconstruction and selection by the describer, who must decide which particular elements of the characters, costumes, set and action are to remain. Given its importance for professional practice, the acquisition of an appropriate yet flexible concept of relevance for audio descriptions is one of the main aims of any AD course, but how can translator trainees learn to decide what to describe? This paper presents a teaching proposal aimed at tackling the problem of relevance in audio description through the combined use of evaluation criteria and film narrative. Introduction Audio description (AD) in Spain is at present in a favourable position. On the one hand, there has been a subtle yet noteworthy rise in its practice. The percentage of ADs in television programming and DVDs is far from being close to the numbers in other European countries such as Great Britain or Germany. Yet, the mere fact of having overcome the previous situation, where ADs were almost exclusively done by private associations for the blind (cf. Orero, 2007), and having reached the general public market, is of significant relevance. On the other hand, the shifts in focus which always seem to guide research have lead the academic world of Audiovisual Translation (AVT) in the last two years to become increasingly aware of AD: It has become the focus of several research groups, conferences, workshops and books (Braun, 2008). However, and for the time being, this interest has not yet produced a wide variety of descriptive research to account for the actual characteristics of the descriptions made in Spain or elsewhere. Finally, as a consequence of the increase in AD practice and research, Spanish universities have also included AD courses both in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes (Badia & Matamala, 2007). In this context, AD teachers have to juggle between reference texts, samples of everyday practice and existing guidelines in an attempt to set the standards which will guide students in their future practice. As Remael and Vercauteren say (2007, p. 74): Students [...] are translators to be and they need guidelines or ‘rules’ that help them make decisions and teach them how to evaluate different translation choices. Some of the hardest decisions for AD students to make regard relevance, the selection and prioritisation of the information that best conveys in the linguistic code of the description the multi-coded message portrayed by the original. The Universitat Jaume I in Castelló was a pioneer in introducing AVT at an undergraduate level from the very creation in 1993 of the degree in Translation and Interpreting. As a response to the social demand for media accessibility, it seemed only natural to include a specific course in Subtitling for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (SDH) and AD within the AVT specialisation, starting in May 2007. The theoretical approach to teaching relevance in AD presented in this paper was designed for this one-term course. The problem of prioritisation Unlike dubbing and subtitling, the practice of AD in Spain has been regulated from early on by an official set of guidelines —Norma UNE 153020 (AENOR, 2005). It is advisable to familiarise students with the conventions it contains in order to prepare them for future practice, so these guidelines must be taken as a starting point for a systematic approach to the prioritisation of information in Spanish AD courses. However, it should not be regarded as the sole reference document. After a thorough comparison between the Spanish and British guidelines, Bourne and Jiménez (2007) concluded that the conventions displayed in the Norma UNE appear to represent just one particular concept of AD which is, furthermore, not confirmed to be based on the actual preferences of receivers (ibid.: 186). In a more generic approach, Chao states that there are two possible positions that may be adopted by describers (as cited by Yeung, 2007, p. 241): They can take the subsidiary role of co-narrators translating certain signs for theunsighted audience. Co-narrators perform a task similar to ‘filling blanks’. But describers can also take the pro-active role of independent narrators, taking control of the overall product by making their own narration, the dialogues and soundtrack work together. It becomes apparent that there is not yet a clear univocal standard for audio descriptions and that students, the future describers, should be capable of producing different kinds of descriptions in order to adapt to any given context. An AD course must consequently provide them with the tools to do so by taking into account as many existing guidelines as possible and, ideally, previous practices. Vercauteren (2007) compiled information from the Spanish, British, German and Flemish guidelines to provide the outline of a set of future European guidelines, and concluded that they present approximately the same structure of information to be described, organised in three areas: What to describe, When to describe it and How to describe it. But there is something else all guidelines have in common, their emphasis on prioritising all this information. Indeed, Matamala and Orero (2007) consider the ability to select critical information to be one of the basic competences which should be achieved by learning describers. But how can this be done? Which elements make the describer choose among the list of what, when and how? There has been little research on the subject (Braun, 2008), and the few answers provided so far remain vague (cf. Remael & Vercauteren, 2007, p. 76; Vercauteren, 2007, p. 148;). Salway (2007, p. 152) states that “AD will concentrate on providing sufficient information, complementary to the dialogue, so that audiences are able to understand who is doing what, where and why”. However, he does not specify what “sufficient” implies, or by which means we can be sure that audiences do understand the product with our descriptions. Regarding the AD process, Poethe (2005, p. 40) considers that describers imagine a prototype AD whose features are to be incorporated in the real description. But he does not provide an account of how these main features are to reach the describer’s subconscious to build up the given prototype. The English Guidelines affirm that “the describer must learn to weed out what is not essential” (Audetel, 2000, p. 13), but once again there is no account of how this is to be done. These guidelines do contain a small chapter dedicated to relevance, but it provides scant guidance that could be used for didactic purposes. Three recommendations are made, namely: Setting the scene Providing clear descriptions as the main aim of audio description, especially clarifying who is speaking at any given moment. Keeping descriptions to the point, since describing too much can be exhausting, irritating or dilute the mood of a scene Implicitly, then, both researchers and authors of guidelines rely on the professional describer’s background to choose which elements to describe in each specific situation —and by background we mean not only the awareness of the audiovisual text components, the cinematic devices, the intertextualities and narrative clues, etc. but also the knowledge acquired from practice. This assumption is perfectly reasonable in a professional context, but some problems arise when it is taken into the classroom (cf. Braun, 2008, p. 15). Firstly, we cannot simply presume our students will have the necessary background for a reasoned decision-making with regards to relevance. This will depend on the characteristics of each course and its potential students (undergraduate or postgraduate, as part of a general translation degree, or part of a specific Master’s degree in AVT, or even part of a specialisation course aimed at professional translators, etc.) and therefore must be dealt with and solved individually. The students for which our theoretical approach was constructed present a clearly defined profile: being in the last course of a translation degree and having already attended courses on dubbing and subtitling, they are well aware of the multi-coded nature of the audiovisual text and its implications for translation. However, in an academic context, the specificities of audio description demand that basic rules be exposed regarding relevance. This leads us to the second and most important problem: the necessary aim at objectiveness in the teaching and evaluation of relevance in audio descriptions. Put another way, are we as teachers entitled to evaluate the students’ choices without having told them how to choose? Evaluation must be objective and based on measurable elements, and that is why we need, as Vercauteren says (2007, p. 140), a “set of structured, clear guidelines” to be applied, in this case, to the selection of items from the above mentioned list of what, when and how. However, such guidelines must not only be structured and clear, but also open enough to be applied to all possible situations in a given film or play. We must therefore face the challenge of conciliating the specificity of relevance with the need for structured and reasoned decision-making by students. Remael and Vercauteren (2007) have designed and applied a model based on the analysis of the exposition phase of films through the twelve narrative strategies discussed by Lucey (1996). This model helps students identify relevant visual clues which are later included in their descriptions. As we will see, film narrative is indeed a valuable tool to tackle the issue of relevance, which structures the students’ mental processes. However, some degree of subjectivity still remains in an approach which considers solely filmic narrative. Our proposal intends to reach a higher level of objectivity through the integration of evaluation in the process of decision-making. By self-evaluating their descriptions from the very first moment, the students learn to systematize their choices; thus, evaluation becomes not only a final assessment, but also a means of reflection. As a result, we present a multi-faceted approach, synthesized in fig. 1, in which final decisions regarding relevance depend on the combination of three factors. On the one hand, the knowledge of the list of items which should ideally be described –Poethe’s prototypical AD–, which is brought to us by the existing literature on AD (represented 1 Lucey’s strategies are visuals from action, grand images, visual metaphors, symbols, continuity visuals, mood and set-up visuals, wallpapering, walk-and-talk-scenes, business, image systems and settings, as cited by Remael and Vercauteren (2007). as “guidelines” in the figure). On the other hand, the evaluation criteria, which guide the process of selecting items from this list, especially in less context-ridden occasions, hence the two-way arrow. And finally, a narrative analysis of the film will contribute to more systematic decisions at any point of the process. In the following sections each of the three factors will be discussed separately in greater detail. Fig. 1: Theoretical approach for the teaching of relevance Guidelines: types of information to be described For this first factor, a combination of existing guidelines and research was deemed most appropriate, aiming to grant the students with the widest possible range of options, so that they might eventually adapt their descriptions to very different AD styles. The following is a very schematic list of the main questions concerning a description: what should be described (i.e. the items which should ideally be described), when the description should be inserted and how the description should be written. This specific factor has been the object of other research, and it is not our aim to provide a different perspective, but rather to combine the information presented in the British and Spanish guidelines and in the studies conducted by Vercauteren (2007), Salway (2007) and Turner (1998). (1) What to describe a. Images i. Where: setting, spatial relations between characters, movement of characters ii. When: film time 2 For further insight on this topic we refer to these authors as well as to Audetel (2000) and AENOR (2005). iii. What: action iv. Who: physical description, facial and corporal expressions, clothing, occupation and roles v. How: lighting, décor, attitudes b. Sounds: difficultly identifiable sounds, song lyrics, languages other than the source language c. On-screen text: logos, opening titles and credits, cast lists, text on signs, subtitles (2) When to describe a. During silences, although background noise, music soundtrack or distant conversations may be overlapped by descriptions when necessary b. Suspense and tension should not be tampered with by description c. The original must be able to breathe through the description, too much description can be tiring d. The description must be synchronised with action. i. Scenes can be announced beforehand only on specific occasions and never if this gives away the plot ii. Exception: sound effects can be described beforehand, or their description can be delayed if it is more effective in terms of narrative tension (3) How to describe a. Clarity in exposition is essential i. Script must be fluent, straightforward, adequate, varied, euphonic and without redundancies ii. Precise and specific vocabulary should be used b. Vocabulary and style must accompany the original’s c. Present tense should be used d. 1 person pronouns should be avoided, except in children’s programmes e. Clearly biased or personal interpretations should be avoided This list was created for inclusion in a course manual that intends to provide the students with a very broad and open concept of audio description for recorded programmes from a European perspective. Positive as this is, the drawbacks of such a broad list are immediately apparent: it is impossible to include all the items in a description, hence the importance of guiding the students through the selection process. Our first strategy to help the students decide comes from evaluation criteria. Evaluation criteria The quality assurance promoted by the Declaration on the European Space for Higher Education has triggered a commitment to adopt student-centred methodological approaches, such as portfolios, problem-based learning, peer-evaluation, etc. All such methods pay special attention to evaluation as an integral part of the teaching-learning process. According to Klenowski (2004), the use of explicit criteria helps to establish goals and expectations. If properly applied, a clear set of evaluation criteria may work not only as an assessment guide for the teacher or students, but also as a means to formative evaluation. In order to do so, it is crucial that students be informed of what is expected from them from the very start, and that evaluation criteria be known, shared, and compiled in a public document (IDES, 2008). In fact, with the evaluation criteria we present, our aim was to create a guide which would help students not only to assess their final descriptions, but also to reflect during the process of describing. We must remember that the first step –and perhaps the most difficult– when learning to describe is to deal with the feeling of leaving things out. There is too much information on screen and students may feel at a loss when trying to prioritise information. A correction guide works as a reminder of the previously mentioned list of items to describe by highlighting the first bits of information that might be discarded, when facing time constraints, and those which must remain. By confronting their descriptions with this guide, the students are able to weed out, in Audetel’s words, what is not essential. The Department of Translation at the Jaume I University based its official evaluation criteria for translation corrections on Hurtado (1999). As academic literature on AD did not provide any proposal of didactic-oriented evaluation criteria, this document was taken as a base for the design of the correction guide presented in this paper. Thus, following AENOR (2005), Audetel (2000), Díaz-Cintas (2007), Matamala and Orero (2007), Bourne and Jiménez (2007), and Vercauteren (2007), the original items were amended and extended in order to apply to the specificities of AD. The following table is the list of possible mistakes to be avoided, with the acronyms used in exercise correction. For the purpose of clarity, the table is divided in two, Table 1a contains general correction criteria elaborated by the Department of Translation which, however general, can also be applied to AD; Table 1b, which we will be looking at in more detail, shows AD-specific evaluation criteria and those requiring an AD-specific sub-section. Table 1a. Evaluation criteria for audio descriptions in an academic context: General items NMS Not making sense Difficult to understand, unclear phrasing, not making sense at all. GR Grammar Syntax and morphology errors. DIAL Dialect Deviates from the original’s geographical, temporal or social dialect; inappropriate deviations from standard, failure to convey idiolect. REG Register Inconsistencies in field, mode or tenor with respect to the original. TEX Textual Lack of coherence, lack of logic, poor use of conjunctions. SEM Semiotics Macrosigns: unsolved extralinguistic references or cultural implications. Microsigns: appropriateness to genres and discourses, unsolved intertextual references. Table 1b. Evaluation criteria for audio descriptions in an academic context: Specific items Linguistic transfer VOC Vocabulary Barbarisms, inappropriate lexical choices. AD: Vagueness, use of non-specific vocabulary; inadequacy to the vocabulary of the text to be described. ST Style Cacophonies, pleonasms, unnecessary repetitions, poor style. Deviates from the style of the text to be described. AD: Not complying with stylistic norms of AD. Pragmatic and Intersemiotic transfer PRA Pragmatics Inability to convey the intentionality, irony, inferences, presuppositions, implications, illocutionary acts of the text to be described. AD: Addition of non-intended pragmatic information. SUP Suppression Suppression of visual, acoustic or textual information needed to understand the text, especially setting the scene (plot, time and space) and the characters in the scene. Suppression of relevant thematic connections. EX Excess Obscuring dialogue with AD, diluting the mood of the scene with too much description, covering too much musical information. 3 By “text to be described” or, in short, “text” we refer here and throughout the table to the version which will reach the audience, comprising dialogues, images and sound. The usual practice in Spain for recorded products presents AD with the dubbed version of dialogues, when the product is not originally in the same language of the description (Matamala & Orero, 2007, p. 333). In such cases, the assessment should be made taking into account the dubbed version, and not the original. Describing obvious elements, redundant with the information conveyed by the acoustic channel.