ABSTRACT
The present chapter looks at the benefits narratology can offer for the study and practice of audio description. It is argued that many audiovisual products that are audio described tell a story, and the AD should allow the target audience to understand and enjoy that story. In the first section we outline three reasons why narratology is useful for AD, namely because it unveils universal principles underlying story creation that can be applied to any type of narrative, because it is a theory that can be applied to narratives told in any kind of medium, be it oral, visual or audiovisual, and because it studies both how authors create stories and how audiences process them. In the second section, I present an overview of contributions that have applied the theory of narrative to AD, both descriptively and experimentally, taking the two main parts of the translation process, source text analysis and target text creation, as a point of departure. From this overview it becomes clear that narratology has already received its fair share of attention in AD research, but that there are still many other research avenues to explore. Those will be briefly highlighted in section three.
