Agnieszka Szarkowska

Auteur Description
The article outlines a new type of audio description: auteur description, which aims to immerse the blind and partially sighted audience into the story world created by the auteur-director, as presented in the screenplay. Two fi lms: Volver by Pedro Almodóvar and Dzień Świra (The Day of the Wacko) by Marek Koterski, are used to highlight the main features of auteur description: the use of metaphors, emotional and marked language, subjective descriptions, all based on the screenplay text.

Multimedia in Education: AD Potential in Guiding the Learner’s Visual Attention
The aim of this article is to present audio description as a technique of subtle gaze direction during the perception of multimedia material. Multimedia educational materials dynamically take over the educational market. Substantial research findings support their effectiveness; however, there are also arguments pointing at difficulties in the perception of multimedia materials. In this paper we focus on two potential sources of these problems. The first source we associate with the design of multimedia. There are a number of rules that need to be followed when designing multimedia educational materials, such as the rule of multimodality or the rule of time and space coherence. The second source of the diffi culties we assign to the complexity of multimedia which may result in cognitive overload. As a solution we postulate to introduce audio description as a technique leading to the unity of image and sound. Supporting arguments come from eye-tracking studies on audio description in the education of sighted people. For example, primary school children watching a film with audio description concentrated their gaze more on the object highlighted in audio description than the control group what helps in the learning content understanding. The research overview positively verifies the potential role of audio description as a subtle gaze direction in the multimedia education of sighted people.

This paper presents an outline of current audiovisual translation practises in Poland. It
situates audiovisual translation (AVT) within the larger context of Translation Studies,
discussing its characteristics, problems and challenges to be faced in the nearest future.
In Poland AVT has traditionally been associated with cinema subtitling and television
voice-over, of which the latter – to the baffl ement of many AVT scholars – still enjoys
great popularity. However, these two major AVT modes are accessible mostly to people
without disabilities. The question of accessibility of the media to the deaf and hardof-
hearing as well as the blind and visually impaired is now beginning to be tackled
in Poland. So far, it is only the public television TVP that offers programmes with
audiodescription, subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing or sign language interpreting.
Hopefully, new EU regulations have a chance to pave the way to increase the accessibility
of audiovisual programs and to open new fi elds of research in AVT.