O som do silêncio: como a falta de legendas para surdos e ensurdecidos afeta a experiência do público brasileiro

Abstract

This study analyzes the current state of audiovisual accessibility for the deaf and hard-of-hearing audience in Brazil, taking as its object of study the movie “Sound of Metal” (2019), a work whose central theme is deafness and whose main narrative device is the sound. It starts from the observation that, although most people with hearing impairment in the country are oralized and depend on Portuguese subtitles, this movie, on the Amazon Prime Video platform, offers only one accessible subtitle track, the Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (SDH) in English. In other words, the standard Portuguese subtitle, aimed at the hearing audience, excludes the very viewer who would benefit most from accessible subtitles in their own language. The objective is to investigate how the absence of Portuguese SDH affects this audience and to assess the effectiveness of SDH resources, especially the translation of sound effects, editing (reduction and explicitation), and the marking of the point of audition. The research, qualitative and documentary in nature, uses as its corpus two subtitle versions available on the platform: the English SDH, used as an accessibility reference, and the standard Portuguese subtitle, analyzed in terms of what it does not offer to the deaf and hard-of-hearing audience. The theoretical framework brings together the Brazilian Law of Inclusion for Persons with Disabilities and the National Cinema Agency (ANCINE) Normative Instruction No. 128, the Guide for Accessible Audiovisual Productions (Naves et al., 2016), Nascimento’s (2013) categorization of sound effects, the concept of Accessible Audiovisual Translation (AVT) by Díaz-Cintas and Remael (2021), and Chion’s (2011) concept of the point of audition. Ten scenes were selected and analyzed in comparative tables between the two subtitle tracks. The results showed that the English SDH methodically uses explicitation to translate sounds, identify speakers, and convey the protagonist’s subjective point of audition, whereas the Portuguese subtitle translates only the dialogue and song lyrics, omitting the sonic dimension that gives meaning to the work, with the most significant losses occurring precisely in the scenes where sound is crucial. It is concluded that the lack of accessibility considerably compromises the experience of the Brazilian deaf and hard-of-hearing viewer and diverges both from the movie’s theme and from the legal guarantees provided in the country, highlighting the gap that still exists between what the law determines and the access that actually reaches this audience.