THREE DIFFERENT

RECEPTIONS
OF THE SAME
FILM
Pilar Orero
 ‘The Pear Stories Project’
applied to audio description.
Pilar Orero
holds an MA in Translation by Universitat Auto` noma de
Barcelona (UAB),Spain, and a PhD in Translation by
UMIST, UK. She lectures at UAB where she also
coordinates the Online Master in Audiovisual
Translation.

She is the co-editor of The Translator’s Dialogue(1997) and the editor of Topics in Audiovisual Translation(2004), both
published by John Benjamins. She is co-writer of a forthcoming book on Voice-over. In the field of Media Accessibility she is
co-editor of Media for All: Subtitling for the Deaf, Audio Description and Sign Language,published in Amsterdam by
Rodopi. She is the guest editor of the special issue of TRANS 11 on Media Accessibility in Spain. She is the leader of
two university networks (CEPACC and RIID-LLSS) which group 24 Spanish universities devoted to mediaaccessibility
research and quality training. She is a member of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Specialised Translation and
Monographs in Translation and Interpreting.

Audio description (AD)
is the technique which makes
audiovisual texts accessible for those
who have no access to the visual
channel.
This technique has existed since
ancient times in both written and oral
forms (Pujol and Orero, 2007) but given
the fact that we now live in a world of
audiovisual input and information
technology, it has become increasingly
important to avoid the risks of excluding
a large portion of society, whose special
needs require this technique to palliate
their sensory difficulties.
 The article is the result of an
empirical study investigating one of
the many *thorny issues in audio
description:

The origin of the article ● the reception of a film

narrative by a given culture
(Spanish),
● along with contrastive analyses
with two other different cultures
(US and Greek).

*A thorny problem, question, subject, etc is difficult to deal with.

 Recounting events is a culturally
determined, conventionalized
Hypothesis activity, and that it remains so even
when these events are recounted
through new forms of
communication.
Owing to different rhetorical conventions, shaped by time and
historical circumstances, different cultures tell events in
different ways. This should help us explain the different
expectations from Spanish, Greek, and US audio description
(AD) audiences, respectively.

(Orero 2008:4)

Drafting an audio
description script
What to describe is one of the most
challenging issues involved in writing a
script for audio description (Orero, 2005;
Varcauteren, 2007; Yeung, 2007).
The main concern of the Orero’s
research was to identify similarities
and differences in the reception of
the same audiovisual text by
different cultures, in order to
formulate one or more hypotheses
to be used as a point of departure
for future research.
 The Pear Story and its relevance for a culture-oriented experiment in
audio description
● A set of events, taking place
simultaneously and in a sequence,
showing a high degree of
codification and proving trivial or
quite marked for the development
of the plot.
● A set of characters with different
features which should elicit culture-
specific interpretation.
● A set of sounds which accompany
the narrative, but no verbal language.
The sounds should provide an
auditory experience to be tested
across cultures.
● The visual images which will at a later
stage be associated to the visual
language and rhetoric used in the
film: description or narration, with
the range of vocabulary, syntax and
grammar choices.
 A number of items which raise crucial issues and require a particular
effort on the part of both the audio description writers and the
receivers:
● Man with a goat. This scene was created in order to test how a background
event, with no significance for the development of the story, is perceived by
viewers. This issue is very important for AD, since there is no clear indication in
any of the existing guidelines as what to do with this sort of information.
● Falling off the bike and spilling the pears. These two excerpts were created in
order to evaluate the impact of language used to express cause and effect,
which raises interesting issues in the development of the narrative and the
writing of an AD script.
● Table-tennis bat toy. In this sequence, one of the children is holding a toy
which has no fixed name in any language. The purpose of this was to test
how people describe a familiar object without possibly recurring to set
expressions.

● Farmer discovers stolen basket. In the final scene, the farmer discovers
that his fruit has been stolen. This part of the film proves particularly
interesting because it forces the viewer to describe emotions, a very
thorny issue in AD writing.
 ● While narration is considered a
universal experience, the rhetoric
used in different cultures varies
greatly.
● A new set of tests would shed some

Conclusion light on cultural evolution,where

globalization and the increasing
importance of the internet would
certainly play a major role.
● Fresh data may reveal a more
homogeneous picture
What the future will bring?