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.
