Speaker: Laura Marra

I hold a Master's Degree in Technical-Scientific Translation and Interpreting at University of Salento, Lecce, Italy. I am currently attending my first year in a PhD program focusing on audio description for the blind and the visually impaired (AD) as a form of intersemiotic translation.

My research interests are audio description for the blind and visually impaired and news translation.
As far as AD is concerned, I am developing my research project by working on the viability to apply functionalist methods to the analysis of filmic audio description. The general idea of my project is focused on elaborating an alternative version of AD which provides the audience with the essence of the implicit meaning of the audiovisual source text, rather than focusing on the objective description of characters, object and events appearing on screen.
I am currently working on a contrastive analysis of Spanish and Italian AD scripts. The analysis is carried out in order to look at similarities and differences in the way of providing the audience with verbal transpositions of the same images, as well as to assess to what extent these version convey the communicative aim associated to each film scene.
My interest in news translation mainly focuses on the techniques and strategies used to spread information across cultures, in order to look at the way in which cultural filters affect the translatorial process.