Chapter 8. Opera audio description in the spoken-written language continuum

Abstract

Corpus linguistics research on audio description (AD) – the verbal rendering of visual information generally targeted at people with visual impairment – has focused on film and museums. The present corpus gathers opera AD scripts from the Liceu opera house (Bacelona) and Teatro Real (Madrid), and sorts them into four subcorpora, two devoted to AD throughout the performance and two comprising audio introductions (AI). I set to interrogate where opera AD falls in the spoken-written language continuum. The results suggest that all subcorpora are of a high lexical density, and in terms of lexical variation, the standardised type-token ratio remains below 50%. The mean sentence and word length, and the Flesch-Szigriszt readability results lead us to place the AIs closer to written language than ADs.