Recommendations for Chinese audio description guidelines through case-study analysis

The development of Audio Description (AD) around the world deviates from region to region and language to language. Although most Chinese-speaking communities practice AD, unlike the English-speaking communities, there are no formal AD guidelines available. This aim of this paper is to produce a proposed AD guideline for the Chinese language. First, research is being conducted on the development of AD in English-speaking and Chinese-speaking communities where findings show that Chinese AD are usually volunteer led and the practice varies across the volunteer groups. Next, a thorough comparison of four sets of English AD guidelines help to identify key areas of concern and the background knowledge required for the case study analysis to be conducted. Triple case studies on the English-Chinese parallel AD texts of three different films are being analysed. In addition, a corpus was built to function as supplementary resources for the case study analyses. The AD texts of the case studies and corpus obtained were produced by different entities. This ensures that the findings reflect the prevailing practices where the strengths and weakness of various AD practices. The analyses captured the distinctive styles of Chinese AD texts and are later captured in the final proposal for Chinese AD guidelines. The proposed guidelines took bearing from the English AD guidelines but reflects the linguistic features and style of the Chinese AD. Through the Chinese AD guidelines proposed, this paper hopes to provide a common ground and starting point for beginners in the industry.Master of Art