Pear Stories and Audio Description: Language, Perception and Cognition across Cultures

摘要

In the mid-1970s, professor Wallace Chafe, a specialist in Native American languages at the University of California, Berkeley, set up an experiment to test the reception of a visual story in different languages. He designed a very simple film (the Pear Film) to elicit stories (the so-called 'pear stories') from speakers around the world. The idea was to compare how representatives of different cultures and languages talk about universal experiences: a man picking pears, a boy stealing a basket of the pears, then riding a bicycle before colliding with a stone and falling down, and some boys helping him to gather the pears and helping him back on his bike. Some 30 years later, under the umbrella of the European project DTV4ALL, academics in many countries from the field of Audiovisual Translation decided to use the Pear Film to check whether relevant cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences related to film reception are insignificant enough to enable the development of common European audio description (AD) guidelines. The project was called the Pear Tree Project (PTP) and results related to the project are presented in this special issue. Some of the articles deal directly with the project, whereas others take the film as starting point but extend beyond the project itself in the context of the theory and practice of audio description.