model. However, to create this solution, the translator will have had to take into account the context of the film and the contribution from all modes, and assess the knowledge of the target audience. Similar considerations apply to AD. Although the richness of visual images makes it normally impossible to describe them in full, the label ‘partial translation’ (Benecke 2014) may not capture the essence of AD. In Avatar, for instance, we can safely assume that the producer thought showing the mysterious Pandora moon in detail was the most relevant way of introducing it to the audience (given the considerable financial investment into the motion capture techniques used for this). However, this does not mean that recipients can understand the visual stimulus only if they have a full account of it. The images are highly redundant. By highlighting selected details, the audio describer can supply cues that enable blind recipients to activate relevant knowledge and create a relevant mental model. The Principle of Relevance guides this process, but once again it is not simply a tool of enabling the audio describer to distinguish between “relevant” and “irrelevant” information. The describer is as much subject to the human search for optimal relevance as any other viewer, i.e. s/he will consider all elements of the multimodal source discourse in the hope to find a relevant interpretation. Only then will s/he be able to select the cues that are most likely to support the creation of an appropriate mental model in the blind audience. Given Brown & Yule’s (1983) observation that understanding often works by analogy, the use of descriptions likening the mysterious habitat to familiar entities in our world (such as “spirals like concentric up-side-down parasols”, “hammer-headed creature” to refer to the shape of an exotic plant and animal respectively) seems to be an effective way to create meaning for no unjustifiable effort.
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