Dynamic characteristics

Standard level N-channel enhancement mode Field-Effect Transistor (FET) in a plastic package using TrenchMOS technology. This product is designed and qualified for use in computing, communications, consumer and industrial applications only. 1.2 Features and benefits � Higher operating power due to low thermal resistance � Suitable for high frequency applications due to fast switching characteristics 1.3 Application

Approaching the audio description of humour

Este artículo tiene como propósito principal ofrecer una introducción a la audiodescripción (AD) y realizar una aproximación a la cuestión de la AD, a la vez que se comenta brevemente la situación actual de esta práctica y se mencionan algunos de los trabajos más representativos de este campo. A continuación se presenta un estudio de caso cuyo principal objetivo consistió en analizar (desde una perspectiva descriptiva y centrando la atención en los chistes visuales) la AD de la comedia británica I want Candy (se muestran varios ejemplos con objeto de ilustar cómo se manejó el humor). Algunos de los resultados obtenidos son: 1) si bien se detectaron ciertos momentos puntuales y marginales en los que la descripción se superpuso al diálogo, en términos generales se respetó la regla de usar los espacios o silencios entre diálogos para incluir la descripción (lo que en ocasiones supuso la pérdida de elementos potencialmente humorísticos) y 2) casi dos quintas partes de los fragmentos visuales potencialmente humorísticos no se describieron, probablemente debido a las restricciones temporales. Por último se proponen algunas ideas de investigación futura.G.I. HUM 767 (ayudas a Grupos de Investigación de la Junta de Andalucía) / Editorial Comares (colección interlingua

Audio describing foreign films

This article presents the main challenges of audio describing foreign films: synchronising the translation of foreign language dialogue with audio description, identifying speakers, describing culture-bound elements, and dealing with intertextuality. The findings are discussed with a reference to an explorative study carried out among Polish viewers with visual impairments. The solutions proposed in this article include the name insertion strategy, audio introductions and a number of strategies to deal with culture-specific items in audio description, such as explicitation, naming, generalisation, specification, retention. The results of the study also demonstrate the feasibility of adopting the Translation Studies toolkit to the benefit of audio description

“Why can’t you wear black shoes like the other mothers?” Preliminary investigation on the Italian language of audio description

According to ITC guidelines (2000), audio description should be as objective as possible, provide only relevant information, avoid any personal judgement and patronising attitude. However, since audio description is relatively young and develops at different paces worldwide, theoretical approaches and practical applications are not homogenous. In Italy, for instance, audio description is not an academic discipline yet and initiatives aiming at increasing its use are very loosely connected. However, the amount of TV audio description is not irrelevant, nor is the yearly production by no-profit associations. The language used seems to be influenced by the relatively isolated, slow and new development of audio description in Italy, but also by its literary tradition and the ‘cultural’ attitude of professionals towards spoken and written language. Through corpus-driven analysis of an Italian and an English audio description script of the film Chocolat (L. Hallström, 2000, USA-UK), this contribution aims at drawing attention to some features of the Italian language used, i.e. on the use of a written register and of formal and typically written syntactical structures. In addition, the article challenges relevance and objectivity in the Italian AD script which, although very far from ITC principles, generally seems to meet the expectations of the Italian blind audience

Narration or description: What should audio description “look” like?

Like the various forms of audiovisual translation (AVT), ‘audio films’ are a hybrid, consisting of both the original film and an audio description (AD) inserted into it as a voice-over that provides the listener with a substitute for the visual content. According to the German guidelines, AD should be objective in order not to compromise the original work. This raises two questions: firstly, is it appropriate for the AD to be descriptive if one assumes that a feature film has a narrative structure, which is primarily represented on the level of images? And secondly, if the aesthetics of the film are essentially a function of its visual content, how can objectivity be reconciled with the stylistic and aesthetic objectives of the movie? This analysis is a contribution to the question of how sound and visual information of a feature film interact to tell a story and, as a consequence, what audio description should ‘look’ like in order to respect both the function of the original and the needs of the target audience

Automated speech and audio analysis for semantic access to multimedia

The deployment and integration of audio processing tools can enhance the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and as a consequence, improve the effectiveness of conceptual access tools. This paper overviews the various ways in which automatic speech and audio analysis can contribute to increased granularity of automatically extracted metadata. A number of techniques will be presented, including the alignment of speech and text resources, large vocabulary speech recognition, key word spotting and speaker classification. The applicability of techniques will be discussed from a media crossing perspective. The added value of the techniques and their potential contribution to the content value chain will be illustrated by the description of two (complementary) demonstrators for browsing broadcast news archives

Audio description as an accessibility enhancer

Audio description for the blind and visually-impaired has been around since people have described what is seen. Throughout time, it has evolved and developed in different contexts, starting with daily life, moving into the cinema and television, then across other performing arts, museums and galleries, historical sites and public places. Audio description is above all an issue of accessibility and of providing visually-impaired people with the same rights to have access to culture, education and ultimately social life. It has to do with making them feel part of societ