Abstract
Access to culture and information is recognized by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, ratified by China in 2008. Access services like audio description facilitate the consumption of audio-visual products such as films by those who suffer from sight loss. This paper attempts to contextualize this access service in China and focuses on those in charge of preparing it – audio describers. In order to provide a profile of these audio describers, a questionnaire was distributed in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou. The results show that an overwhelming majority of those audio describing are volunteers aged 20-50, and most have a university education background which is not related to Audiovisual Translation. They come from a varied professional background, most have only been audio describing for a few years, they lack formal training in audio description and mainly audio describe films in Standard Chinese.
Highlights
According to the United Nations, China is the country with the highest number of citizens with disabilities in the world
Access services like audio description facilitate the consumption of audio-visual products such as films by those who suffer from sight loss
The results show that an overwhelming majority of those audio describing are volunteers aged 20-50, and most have a university education background which is not related to Audiovisual Translation
Summary
According to the United Nations, China is the country with the highest number of citizens with disabilities in the world (cf. Qiu 1998; Wu & Xie 2015: 21). The most recent survey, the Second National Sample Survey on Disability (2006), revealed that there are almost 83 million persons with disabilities in China, 6.34% of the country’s population. In more specific functionally diverse terms, 29.07% have a physical disability, 24.16% suffer from hearing loss, 14.86% have sight loss, 7.40% are mentally disabled, 6.68% are intellectually challenged, and 1.53% have a speech disability, while 16.30% suffer from multiple disabilities. The survey pointed out that more than half of the respondents (53.24%) are at least 60 years old and that the vast majority of them (75.04%) live in rural areas, where residents frequently lack adequate access to healthcare, let alone to culture or information.
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