THE EXPRESSION OF FEELINGS IN THE SHORT FILM BRAVURA AND ITS AUDIO DESCRIPTION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE INTERPERSONAL FUNCTION IN THE VISUAL NARRATIVE AND APPRAISAL IN VERBAL LANGUAGE

ABSTRACT

This article aims to study the expression of feelings in two shots of the short film Bravura and in their audio description (AD). The work falls within the Translation Studies field, more particularly within Accessible Audiovisual Translation, in which AD is a way of making an audiovisual work accessible to visually impaired people. The research reported here has adopted the approach of multimodal social semiotics and Discourse Semantics. To read the visual narrative, the interpersonal systems of Painter, Martin and Unsworth were used, and to analyze the verbal language the Appraisal System of Martin and White (2005) was chosen. To analyze the short film and its AD as genres Martin and Rose (2007, 2008) was used. The methodological proposal by Iedema (2001), of segmenting films for analysis, was partially adopted. The results show, in general, that both visual and verbal texts express meanings of attitude, both with positive charge and graduation of force. The visual narrative, on the other hand, presents a wider range of meanings that evoke affection, especially pathos, environment and graduation. The results also show that there is complementarity between the visual and verbal modes, regarding the interpersonal meaning. However, the visual mode presents a greater variety of these meanings. For example, there is familiarity in colors, which, on the one hand, brings the scene closer to the real. In the character’s design, on the other hand, there is a shift from empathic to appreciative engagement, which distances the viewer from the feelings of that character.

Keywords:
accessible audiovisual translation; audio description; social semiotics; multimodality; visual narrative