The Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation has recently announced that the proposal “The Quality of Live Subtitling (QuaLiSub): A regional, national and international study” has been recommended for funding. The project is led by GALMA and its research team includes Pablo Romero-Fresco (PI1), Luis Alonso Bacigalupe (PI2), Frederic Chaume Varela (UJI), Ana María Pereira Rodríguez (UVIGO), Lourdes Lorenzo García (UVIGO), Ana Tamayo Masero (UPV/EHU) and Irene de Higes Andino (UJI).

QuaLiSub aims to analyse live subtitling quality in Spain (in Galician, Catalan, Basque and Spanish) and in the US in order to issue recommmendations that can improve the access to live TV programmes and events for millions of daily viewers.

Pablo Romero-Fresco, director of GALMA, was invited to be interviewed for En sincronía. En sincronía is a podcast devoted exclusively to audiovisual translation and targeted to the Spanish-speaking community. It is hosted by Damián Santilli, Blanca Arias Badia and Guillermo Parra, and sponsored by Ooona. Pablo’s interview, where he talked about live subtitling and accessible filmmaking, is already available online.

Pablo Romero-Fresco, director of GALMA, was recently invited to participate in #TranslationCafé. This is an informal online series of talks that aims to promote discussions on a range of topics relevant for translators, translation researchers and other translation stakeholders. Together with Wendy Fox (LogMeIn) and David Orrego-Carmona (University of Aston, UK), Pablo talked about creative subtitling and accessibility.

Pablo Romero-Fresco, director of GALMA, has been interviewed for En Pantuflas. En Pantuflas is a podcast which aims to give voice and value to translators. Besides talking about translation issues and news about the industry, successful professionals are also interviewed, bearing in mind that they have a myriad of tips to share with translators and interpreters.

Pablo’s interview will be available online shortly. Do keep an eye on the podcast!

Pablo Romero-Fresco, director of GALMA, has been invited to participate in the Live subtitling through respeaking and velotype online conference, which is to take place on July 9th, 2021, 10.00am – 3.00pm (CEST). Respeakers, velotypists, live captioners and real-time subtitlers, speech-to-text reporters and interpreters, and all related professionals are invited to this one-day event on real-time intralingual subtitling.

This is the final conference of the Live Text Access (LTA) project. At this event, partners will report about the final stage of the project, as well as give an overview about the achievements so far. They will present the elaborated materials and outline the importance of the quality assessment.

Journalists, linguists, translators, captioners, audio describers and experts in easy language as well as trainers and lecturers in both vocational and academic contexts are invited to this one-day asynchronous online event on audiovisual journalism and easy-to-understand language.

EASIT (Easy Access for Social Inclusion Training) is an EU funded project that aims to create training material for experts in these fields. At its last multiplier event, focus will be placed on audiovisual journalism in easy-to-understand language. How to produce news in E2U? What knowledge do the journalists need? What are the users’ expectations and needs? Answers to these questions will be provided. The programme also includes some discussions with experts in audiovisual journalism, easy-to-read or plain language, experts who work with end users and end users themselves.

Please register here.

Participation is free, but registration is required.
Registration is open until June 8th, 2021.
Should you have any question, please contact andrej.tomazin@rtvslo.si.

The Media Accessibility Platform (MAP) will end its beta testing and release its stable version on 20 May 2021, within the activities to celebrate the tenth Global Accessibility Awareness Day. This is a global event that is held every year on the third Thursday of May with the aim of raising awareness on digital access and inclusion.

MAP’s vision is a world where media is accessible to everyone. This can only be achieved through global collaboration and exchange of information about practices, services, technologies and tools in media accessibility. Media accessibility has become a crucial issue in the global agenda on social and cultural inclusion policies, practices and research. In this regard, many national and international institutions have drafted or passed legislation, recommendations and guidelines.

Dr Pablo Romero-Fresco, director of GALMA, has been invited to participate in the Settimana dell’Inclusione 2021, organised by the University of Macerata. The event is to take place online between 15-20 March 2021, and Pablo will talk about creative media accessibility, together with Elena di Giovanni, from the University of Macerata. Their session will take place on Tuesday, 16 March, from 6pm to 7pm (CET).

Should you be interested in attending, please have a look at the conference programme.

Two contributions from the members of GALMA, namely Nazaret Fresno, Hayley Dawson and Pablo Romero-Fresco (director of GALMA), have just been published online. They will appear in one of the forthcoming issues of the international journal The Interpreter and Translator Trainer. Read on!

• “Strengthening respeakers’ training in Spain: the research-practice connection,” by Nazaret Fresno and Pablo Romero-Fresco
• “Towards research-informed training in interlingual respeaking: an empirical approach,” by Hayley Dawson and Pablo Romero-Fresco

We are very pleased to announce a talk on translation and accessibility in film by Pablo Romero-Fresco, director of GALMA.

“Accessible Filmmaking and Creative Media Accessibility”

The talk is going to take place next Tuesday, March 9^th, 2-3 pm (CET), in the Centre for Visual Cultures of Royal Holloway, University of London. For the Teams link for attending the meeting, as well as the details of the talk, please see below.

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Summary of Talk
Despite their importance in the reception and distribution of films, translation and accessibility have traditionally been neglected in the film industry. They are regarded as an afterthought, which results in translators being isolated from the creative team and working in conditions that hamper their attempts to maintain the filmmaker’s original vision. Accessible filmmaking (Romero-Fresco, 2019) offers a potential solution to this problem by considering translation and accessibility in the production process through the collaboration between the creative team and the translator. Originated in 2013 and now applied by both independent filmmakers and mainstream on-demand platforms such as Netflix, accessible filmmaking has led to a reconsideration of how translation and accessibility can be approached in film. Until recently, media accessibility had placed the focus on comprehension: the aim was to provide visually or hearing-impaired audiences with the necessary information to make up for their impairment. Following the cognitive and scientific turn experienced by audiovisual translation and media accessibility over the past decade (Chaume, 2018), most media accessibility guidelines are now based on empirical research, often based on eye-tracking technology. In this approach, media access experts are considered as technicians tasked with applying such guidelines. In other words, science often underpins how films are made accessible, but the artistic side of media accessibility remains unexplored.

Instead of focusing on comprehension and the users’ impairment, the new approach to media accessibility deriving from accessible filmmaking is concerned with facilitating the viewers’ engagement with the film by making use of their abilities. Although empirically-based guidelines on media accessibility are still used as a starting point, media access experts are not here technicians but artistic contributors to the creative process of filmmaking. Thus, this new approach to media accessibility encouraged by accessible filmmaking brings together science and art in order to ensure that all viewers, regardless of their (dis)abilities, have access to the filmmakers’ vision. After an introduction on accessible filmmaking and an analysis of the new engagement-based approach to media accessibility, this talk will present several examples of films where this approach has led to the consideration of the different accessible versions as artistic products in their own right and, to a large extent, as original versions.