The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has recently announced that the project proposal “Shaping Multilingual Access through Respeaking Technology (SMART),” led by the University of Surrey, and with GALMA as a partner, has been recommended for funding.
SMART seeks to investigate how respeaking, a technique that has so far been used to produce intralingual subtitles (i.e., in the same language), can be adjusted to produce interlingual subtitles (i.e., in a different language), and how this could impact society. The project will design, among others, bespoken training courses to equip language professionals with optimal respeaking skills.
Interlingual respeaking is a complex and hybrid practice that combines speech recognition technology, human interpreting and subtitling skills. It has the potential to bridge the gap between hearing and non-hearing people, native and non-native speakers, allowing access to live multimedia and multilingual content.
