Eat drink man woman… and compare. Contrastive analysis of audio description in Chinese and Spanish: a case study

Abstract

This article conducts a contrastive analysis of an audio description in Chinese and Spanish to decide whether the differences between these two languages and cultures translate into significantly different audio description scripts. Our case study is based on the movie Eat, Drink, Men, Woman by Ang Lee (1994) and its analysis is divided into two parts. First, we detected the differences in the descriptions of the characters and, second, we studied the culturemes, which we categorized according to Molina’s (2001) classification. Then we analyzed the translation techniques used to transfer the culturemes using Molina and Hurtado’s (2002) categorization. The results show that there are numerous differences in the way audio description is created between the chosen language pair. This will have an impact on the translation of audio description scripts, a faster and cheaper way to create audio description, which could be used in the future to offer this access service in China.