Traducción accesible en el espacio museográfico multimodal: las guías audiodescriptivas

Abstract

Audio description is an intersemiotic translation modality (Jakobson 1959/2000) that allows visually impaired people to access visual messages in different contexts, including audiovisual media, performing arts, museums and exhibitions (Snyder (ed.) 2010: 7). During the last decade, research in Translation Studies has dealt extensively with audio description and, as a result, it is now a well-established line of research within Audiovisual Translation (Gambier 2004: 9, Kruger and Orero 2010: 141). Most of these studies have focused on film and television audio description (Jiménez (ed.) 2007, Kruger 2010, Remael 2012), but there is now an incipient line of research on audio description at museums and exhibitions (de Coster and Mühleis, Neves 2012, Praxedes and Magalhães 2013, Araújo and de Oliveira 2013), to which this article intends to make a contribution. Making a museum accessible requires experts from various fields to collaborate towards the common goal of transforming the museum into an interactive social agent that contributes to universal accessibility and social inclusion. Audio description is an accessibility tool used in a growing number of museums in multiple countries (Soler 2012). It can be offered during a conducted tour or in an audio descriptive guide, and it has proved to enhance visually impaired visitors' access to the museum (RNIB y Vocal Eyes 2003: 22). The main goal of this paper is to foster the visibility and development of this accessible translation modality. In order to do so, we propose a descriptive methodology to analyse audio description as text genre and translation product. This methodology has been applied to a corpus composed of audio descriptive guides of three museum genres: art, archeology and history.