Extending the uses of museum audio description: implications for translation training and English language acquisition

The paper outlines museum (or art) audio description (AD), an emergent AD subgenre with textual and linguistic specificities that are described. The focus of the paper however is on the didactic potentials of this form of audiovisual translation in an English L2 setting. If exploited adequately, the process of producing and translating ADs in a non-mother tongue can in fact favour the acquisition of both intersemiotic and inverse translation competence while, at the same time, granting the retention and retrieval of diverse L1 and L2 linguistic forms thanks to the noticing effect that working with it can induce. A case study on the creation in Italian and the translation into English of a multimodal descriptive itinerary will contribute to showing how to employ museum AD for both explicit and implicit learning purposes, as well as a means to impart professional-like skills to novice translators.