Imaginary places – Verbalization of setting in the English, German and Spanish audio descriptions of Slumdog Millionaire

In this article we want to demonstrate how three different audio descriptions of the same film construct setting, i.e. the environment or place where the story happens. Audio description is an intermodal translation in which visual information is verbalized and uttered in spoken form. It helps visually impaired people to better access visual and audiovisual communication and culture. The study presented here describes the use of language as verbal cues for setting the film’s scene in the mind of the receiver; for example, the same setting may be verbalized as “interrogation room” or “a small cranked room”. Different versions of the same filmic event provide insight into the possibilities and limits of audio description in verbalizing visual experience by exhibiting differences and similarities in the strategies of verbalization. For this aim, we carried out a comparative analysis of three differentlanguage audio descriptions (English, German and Spanish) of the film Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle & Loveleen Tandan 2008). We will illustrate this analysis in the article by discussing the gradual construction of setting in one scene.