The mechanisms of verbalization of a character’s emotional state in English- and Russian-language audio description for the comedy television series “Ted Lasso”

audio description makes films accessible to individuals with profound visual impairments, promoting inclusion and supporting rehabilitation. This technology compensates for the lack of visual perception by incorporating explanatory voice-over commentary during pauses between character dialogues and significant sounds in a film. This article examines paralinguistic means of representing characters’ basic emotions in both English and Russian audio descriptions of a comedy television series. The authors emphasize that the functional and semantic potential of paralinguistic elements in audio description is realized only in conjunction with the verbal and nonverbal components of each episode and its context, which together ensure semantic precision in the description. The analysis reveals the interaction between parakinemes and paraproxemes, which describe external emotional reactions of characters, and identifies instances of direct nomination of emotional states. These mechanisms are found to be relatively universal in conveying a range of emotions through audio description. The findings of this study may contribute to the development of new strategies for representing emotions in audio description scripts, ultimately enabling more informative and emotionally nuanced content for blind film lovers and improving the overall quality of audio description.

audiovisual translation, intersemiotic translation, audio description, basic emotions, emotional state, paralanguage