A Cross-Cultural Study of Figurative Language in Museum Audio Descriptions. Implications for Translation

As the Translation Studies community moves forward in an increasingly networked globe, and the needs of the new market change, the range of interests of translation as a discipline broadens, new proposals are raised by the market stakeholders and new challenges are discussed in academia. The challenges discussed in this paper come from research on Audio Description (Díaz Cintas 2007) with particular reference to museum Audio Description (AD), an intersemiotic translation which pursues the aim of disseminating knowledge and helping social integration “by performing inclusive practices” (Jiménez Hurtado et al 2015). Starting from the assumption that the language used by the people performing the AD (the audio describers) is a special language shaped by the communicative needs of its users, this research focuses on issues of discursive representation, construction and mediation in English and Italian Audio Descriptions. While the existing literature has shed some light on this type of translation and its main features (i.e. verbal and adjectival constructions; see Neves 2012; Hurtado et al 2015), the area of analogies does not appear to have been investigated from a contrastive perspective. Thus, this paper seeks to address this gap by focusing on the use of analogies and claims that they should be considered as a creative strategy of intersemiotic translation.