The audio description staff has been busy. We’ve described a toy chest full of “Backyardigans” episodes. It’s been fun describing Pablo the Penguin, Tyrone the Moose, Tasha the Hippo, and Austin the Kangaroo as they pretend-play their way across deserts and through museums.
But what to do about Uniqua…the pink…uh… thing. Thankfully, the Nick, Jr. website helped us out by clarifying that she’s a “creature.” Creature sounds better than “Uniqua the pink thing”. .
People don’t generally think about what to call all the odd stuff in the world around them or how they’d express it if retelling the story later. I was listening to the public radio this morning, and the host was on assignment in a “huge” room with murals by Diego Rivera covering every wall. Describer alert! How huge is huge? Is it as big as a football field? Is it seven stories high, seventy stories? How impressed should I be? If you can’t see what’s being referenced, the most concise, vivid description is paramount. And while I’m on the subject, do all public radio personalities change their names so they sound cool when spoken aloud?
Name the NPR host.
Hey, kids. Draw a line from the picture to the cool NPR host surname it most resembles!
Great write-up, Jeremy! Reminds me a bit of one of my experiences as a reviewer of description for DCMP. Here’s something I wrote last year and promptly forgot about, but your post reminded me of it, and I thought I’d share:
I’m sure you’ve had the opportunity of meeting this guy within the pages of one of Dr. Seuss’ beloved yarns—that of the diminutive rascal Sam I Am and his attempts to convince this skeptical pal to expand his culinary horizons by indulging in the rather unconventional offering that Sam totes with him throughout the story.
(A bit of background: we at the DCMP celebrated Read Captions Across America this past Tuesday. Read Captions Across America (http://readcaptionsacrossamerica.org) is a campaign held in conjunction with the NEA’s Read Across America campaign every year, the purpose of which is to underscore the literacy benefits of reading—in our case, the benefits of reading captions. One of the central features of both campaigns is the celebration of the birthday of Dr. Seuss. It was in planning for last year’s observance of Read Captions Across America that I was reviewing the description of “The Sneetches,” “The Zax,” and “Green Eggs and Ham,” thoroughly enjoying the work of the describer. As you are likely aware, Dr. Seuss employed some rather unique visuals and naming conventions in his stories.)
Shortly after beginning my review of “Green Eggs and Ham,” I noticed that the describer had taken to calling him “The Thing.” It quickly dawned on me that I had no idea to what name he was supposed to be referred, but it was most definitely not “The Thing” because “Thing 1″ and “Thing 2″ feature prominently in another Seuss classic, “The Cat in the Hat.” I checked Suessville.com, which is the official Dr. Seuss website–nothing. Random House, who publishes Dr. Seuss’ work, referred to him as “another Seuss character,” which simply wouldn’t do, given its length and frequency of repetition in the story. Even the venerable Wikipedia came up empty (”moody neighbor” and “nameless skeptic” were provided, but I can’t imagine Seuss using such conventional terms to name his characters).
Luckily, the Description Key (http://descriptionkey.org) was there for guidance.
“Consistently identify people/characters by name. Generally, if a name is not given, identify by an ‘obvious’ attribute until a name is provided.”
However, one of Seuss’ stated goals in writing “Green Eggs and Ham” was simplicity of language; there are only 50 words used in the story and 49 of them are monosyllabic. After a long discussion, we settled on “Sam’s Friend.” Doing so brought us close to fulfilling the guideline from the Description Key while satisfying a number of others regarding consistency (”Sam’s Friend” is mentioned more than 20 times in the description) and simple language structure.
Comment by Thom | March 3, 2010 @ 12:01 pm