Insights From Mental Model Theory and Cognitive Narratology as a Tool for Content Selection in Audio Description

One of the main questions in audio description (AD) to which no systematic answers have been provided yet, is how to decide what information you include in your description and – if there is not enough time to describe everything – how you prioritize that information. In the present paper I want to propose an answer to this problem by asking the question: how do audiences process (filmic) stories and what information do they need to process them? The basic idea underlying this question is that people process and interpret stories by creating mental models (Johnson-Laird, 1983) of these stories. The paper explains how these models are created, what information is necessary to create them and what is optional, thus helping describers to decide what information in their description is “need-to-have” and what is “nice-to-have”. The theoretical explanation will be applied to the opening of the film Slumdog millionaire (Boyle, 2008), to illustrate how the theory works and can be used in daily practice. Lay summary Audio description (AD) for film is a service for people with sight loss that weaves a verbal description of visual elements and unclear sound effects they do not have access to, between the dialogues of the original production. Since this description cannot interfere with the dialogues, there often is very little time for AD and describers will have to decide what to include and what to leave out of their descriptions. In this article, I present a way to tackle this problem, based on the basic idea that films generally tell stories and that the audio description should allow the target audience to recreate that story in their minds. More specifically I focus on two questions, namely a) how do audiences mentally recreate stories and b) what elements do they need to do so. Insights into these two questions will show audio describers what information the target audience needs to recreate the story told in the film, and hence will help them to decide what information they really need to include in their AD. After a theoretical exploration of these two questions, the approach will be illustrated by means of a concrete example, taken from the film Slumdog millionaire (Boyle, 2008).

Om Puri: The man who presented the real faces of the subcontinent of India

The Indian film industry continues to turn out between 1600 and 2000 films every year, making it the largest movie-producing country in the world. Yet, it would be a challenge for an average European or American moviegoer to name a film actor from the Indian subcontinent. Naming the films may be easier. For instance, millennials may be able to name Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Generation X crowd may mention Gandhi (1982) and the older audiences may recall The Party (1968) and Ganga Din (1939) as movies about the Indians and India. It was not until the movie Gandhi that Indian actors were allowed to play as Indians. Sam Jaffe and Abner Biberman played as Indians in Ganga Din; Peter Sellers was the Indian actor in The Party, and Shirley MacLaine was the Princess Aouda in Around the World in 80 Days (1956). It is reasonable to assume that many film viewers may be unfamiliar with Om Puri, an actor who played in over 325 films in India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and the United States, and made films in English, Bengali, Punjabi and Tamil languages. Om Puri passed away in 2017. His name may be unfamiliar, but his face and his work as an actor will remain unforgettable. Between Gandhi (1982) and Viceroy’s House (2017), Puri acted in two dozen films in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. This article discusses Puri’s work in popular Hindi cinema, in Indian Parallel Cinema, and European and North American films.

Becoming a Crorepati: From Glocal TV Game to Grobal Fiction

Numerous studies have dealt with the process of globalization and its various cultural products. Three such cultural products illustrate this process: Vikas Swarup’s novel Q and A (2005), the TV quiz show Kaun banega crorepati? (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), and Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire (2008). The novel, the TV show and the film have so far been studied separately. Juxtaposing and comparing Q and A, Kaun banega crorepati, and Slumdog Millionaire provides an effective means to shed light on the dialogic and interactive nature of the process of globalization. It is argued through this case study that an analysis of their place of production, language and content, helps clarify the derivative concepts of “glocalization” and “grobalization” with regard to the way(s) contemporary cultural products respond to globalization.

Audio description and the translation of film language into words

In this paper, we approach audio description (AD) from a Translation Studies point of view. The two first parts are of theoretical interest: AD is defined as a part of the audiovisual text and as a form of intersemiotic translation. Once this is set up, we concentrate on the concept of translation techniques (Molina and Hurtado, 2002) and adapt them to audio description to provide scholars and students with a functional classification of AD techniques (ADT), which can be used for descriptive studies of audio descriptions as well as in training, and is based on a functional classification of translation techniques. The paper ends with detailed examples from a comparative study of several audio descriptions of the film Slumdog Millionaire (2008) using ADTs to illustrate the benefits of the established taxonomy.

The Multidimensional Perspective and Impact of Media-Induced Tourism over Indian Tourism Sector

Indian tourism sector is one of the world’s leading excursion zone. As per the India Brand Equity Foundation [IBEF]. India has 30 world heritage sites to showcase its rich tourism diversity. In 2018, The Foreign Tourism Arrivals [FTA] was recorded approx. 10.6 crores which are a whopping 5% escalation from the previous year. Indian movies are way popular throughout the world. Several Oscar-winning movies were shot in India. Some of them are Life of Pi (2012), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Gandhi (1982) etc. With the popularities of these movies, scenes and location too got popular. The worldwide popularity of such movies escalates the tourism business catalytically. The escalation of tourism leads to improved tourism revenue, jobs, foreign exchange and occupation. The media-induced tourism is the key to the growth of a country’s tourism income but sustainable planning is needed to encash tourism revenue. Even after receiving the tourist major concern are tourist safety, comfort, expenditure, visa process and a lot more. Our proposed paper is about the discussion over cinematographic tourism, the relation of film-induced tourism and measures taken over the upliftment of media-induced tourism.

What’s My Line?

Round One explores works that use (and abuse) trivia to reveal how the hypermediated consumer culture of late capitalism traps individuals in a metaphorical isolation booth, unable to establish a stable sense of self. Just as the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s nearly killed the quiz show, works such as Quiz Show, Melvin and Howard,Slumdog Millionaire, and Chuck Barris’s “unauthorized autobiography” Confessions of a Dangerous Mind suggest that a rigged game presents an existential threat to the self. Amidst the pressure to conform to the norms of the community of television, individuals betray themselves to get ahead in America, often finding themselves trapped in the isolation booth of their social class. Further, Philip Roth’s novel Zuckerman Unbound,Kiese Laymon’s novel Long Division,and Robert Olen Butler’s story “The American Couple,” show how these questions of selfhood in the age of the game show can be exacerbated when the protagonist is an outsider to game-show culture.

Runaway Train

This chapter explores children's engagement with and presence in railway space, a theme depicted, though not thoroughly unpacked, in Lion, Slumdog Millionaire, and beyond. Children use the railway to leave home behind and get to the city, and often stay in railway space for their whole sojourn in the city, or indeed for their whole lives; it is the thread yoking village and city. The railway constitutes perhaps a more powerful metaphor, rendered brick-and-mortar, than any other for child runaways' intimacy with history's forces—empire, capitalism, and rural transformation among them. It is also a space for a very vigorous control imposed upon children's bodies and movements through the vehicle of the state, of informal economies in global capital, and of other mechanisms of power, just as it is a space that the children in question occupy in a type of evasive practice that is irksome to society and government.

Three-Worlds Theory Chutney: Oliver Twist, Q&A and the Curious Case of Slumdog Millionaire

This concluding chapter discusses Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire as both an adaptation of Oliver Twistand—along with Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of The English Patient (1996)—the most famous example of a postcolonial novel reabsorbed into a global imperial context. Excising Vikas Swarup’s subversive rewriting of Oliver Twist in his source text, Q&A, Boyle’s film streamlines the narrative into Hollywood genres accented with Bollywood conventions while presenting India as a nation of others, far removed from the ramifications of British imperialism and benefiting from the structures of the globalized world such as the transnational quiz show that fuels its lead’s rise from the slums. Through examinations of Swarup’s novel and Boyle’s film, this chapter demonstrates the importance of interfidelity to the adaptation process, especially as Hollywood and other national film industries operate under an ever evolving globalized business model that controls representations of postcolonial nations.

Framing Empire

This book examines postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood to contend with both the legacy of British imperialism and the influence of globalized media entities. Since decolonization, postcolonial writers and filmmakers have re-appropriated and adapted texts of the Victorian era as a way to 'write back' to the imperial centre. At the same time, the rise of international co-productions and multinational media corporations have called into question the effectiveness of postcolonial rewritings of canonical texts as a resistance strategy. With case studies of films like Gunga Din, Dracula 2000, The Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair and Slumdog Millionaire, this book argues that many postcolonial filmmakers have extended resistance beyond revisionary adaptation, opting to interrogate Hollywood's genre conventions and production methods to address how globalization has affected and continues to influence their homelands.