a corpus-based approach to the language of audio description

description string or through the dialogues or an external narrator or a
caption/subtitle) then the audio description will not repeat the same
information again. Indeed, redundant descriptions may bore the audience or
result to be exhausting or even irritating. However, if – as a general rule -
redundancy should be avoided in audio description (Hernàndez and
Mendiluce 2004), for scenes with many characters the audio describer would
need to mention the names of all characters as they speak, in order to avoid
confusion in the audience mind. In addition, when a character is played by a
famous actor, normally mentioned at the beginning of the audio description
by „x is played by‟, or „x in the role of y‟, it might be sufficient to mention
the character fewer times than in a case of unknown actors/voices. In the
selection of relevant elements to audiodescribe, the audio describer should
pay attention to objects or situations that will recur later in the film or in the
performance. However, since the sighted viewer saw the object but maybe
did not pay attention to it, or if the intention of the film maker/director was
not to stress its presence, the audio describer will have to use linguistic
instruments to make the presence of that particular object less intrusive as
possible in the audio description.
The issue of relevance goes hand in hand with the issue of quantity in
audio description. Indeed, the extent to which a scene should be audio
described and the degree of specificity of audio description has been
addressed by different scholars (Bourne and Jimenez 2007). Generally
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