Strategies Of Film Interpreting And Discribing For The Blind

The traditional role of the interpreter is a messenger between two different cultures, who serves as a bridge connecting two different ecosystems. The audio description speaker, likewise, takes on the traditional role of a messenger between the visually impaired people and a visual world, whose duty is to eliminate the unbridgable gap between two diametrically opposed realms of senses. The two traditional roles coalesce to generate a new kind of messenger, i.e. audio description speaker between two cultures.This thesis is based on the practise of interpreting and discribing the film On Golden Pond, whose target audience are the visually impaired with scant knowledge of English. The study will examine in detail the time limitation between dialogue and image interpreting, the interpreting of images beyond special audience’s cognition and the sequence of meaning interpreting with appropriate attention distribution, in the hope that it can help expand an interpreter’s professional practice and enrich the cultural life of the visually impaired people.From the perspective of the reality-cognition-language mode in cognitive linguistics and the triangle mode in interpretive theory, this thesis discusses the interpretation choices and strategies that can be used in the four scene types during film interpreting. It is argued that, through flexible interpreting strategies, we can help the visually impaired who are not bilingual to understand a foreign film and equip them, to some extent, with the experience of "watching" a film.