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
