Referential Elements in Turkish Audio Description Texts

Abstract

This study focuses on Turkish audio description texts in an attempt to illustrate the difficulty in linking referential elements with their antecedents arising from particular structural properties of Turkish (e.g. the possibility to omit pronouns and genitive-marked possessor noun phrases in appropriate contexts) and to discuss possible solutions for this problem. The data to be analyzed come from a 30,000-word corpus consisting of audio description texts prepared by students taking a course in audio-visual translation in an undergraduate program in translation studies. A detailed data analysis indicates that omission of antecedent pronouns and possessor noun phrases due to regular syntactic/pragmatic conventions of Turkish hampers unambiguous co-indexation of referential elements, especially given the unavailability of visual input in the audio description environment. In order to facilitate correct interpretation of co-referentiality, possible solutions are word order changes, proper use of sentence intonation and repetition of antecedents in the form of full noun phrases, etc.

Keywords

• audio description
• referential element
• antecedent
• co-referential
• co-indexation