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Corpus Use in Cross-linguistic Research: Paving the way for teaching, translation and professional communication
Edited by Marlén Izquierdo and Zuriñe Sanz-Villar
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 113] 2023
► pp. 142–156

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

 | Autonomous University of Barcelona
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.
Keywords: audio description, opera, corpus linguistics, spoken-written language, readability
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The language of audio description through the lens of corpus linguistics
  • 3.The spoken-written continuum
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Sample of scripts
    • 4.2Measures
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Lexical density
    • 5.2Lexical variation
    • 5.3Mean sentence length
    • 5.4Mean word length
    • 5.5Flesch-Szigriszt readability index
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.113.08her
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