News Archives • Page 4 of 4 • Galma Observatory

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.

Pablo Romero-Fresco, director of GALMA, has recently participated in several events on audiovisual translation. He was invited as a keynote speaker and panellist to participate in the workshop GIMEK-Ç (Görsel-işitsel medya hizmetlerine engelsiz erişimde kalite çaliştay – Quality in Audiovisual Media Accessibility), which was held in Ankara (Turkey) on December 9th, 2019. The event, which was attended by government and university representatives, as well as stakeholders from the media, NGOs and other major actors, focussed on quality in media accessibility and the implementation of accessibility practices in the country.

Pablo was also invited to participate in the II Seminario del grupo de innovación educativa ARENA (Accesibilidad, Traducción audiovisual y aprendizaje de lenguas) – “La integración de la traducción audiovisual en el proceso creativo de las obras audiovisuales,” which was held at the Faculty of Philology of the UNED (Madrid) on November 8th. His talk, “La producción audiovisual accesible: un puente para la colaboración entre creadores y traductores,” is available online.

He was invited as well as a plenary speaker to the I International Conference on Social Inclusion, Audiovisual Translation and Audiovisual Communication, within the framework of the ITACA (Inclusión social, Traducción Audiovisual y Comunicación Audiovisual) project. He gave the talk “Integrating Translation and Accessibility into the Filmmaking Process,” on accessible filmmaking.

Translators, subtitlers, audio describers, news journalists, and experts in Easy-to-Read and Plain Language are invited to this one-day event on the creation of easy-to-understand audiovisual content. EASIT (Easy Access for Social Inclusion Training) is an EU-funded project that aims to create training materials for experts in these fields. During this event, the EASIT project and its recent results will be presented.

The diverse needs of text recipients have been attracting attention among researchers and practitioners in the field of accessible communication in recent times. Debates have focused around how to adapt texts to cater for the linguistic and perceptive needs of recipients with special communicative needs. However, the question about the kinds of texts such recipients need, through what media and in what situation they access this information have not been receiving adequate attention. Efforts to achieve communicative inclusion have had different focus in different countries. For example, emphasis is more on texts of legal and administrative communication in Germany, while the primary focus in Spain is on literary texts. So far, though, no country has successfully implemented an approach comprehensive and varied enough to cover the needs of the recipients for all communicative situations. Printed texts have been the focus of attention despite that they play a rather marginal role in practice when compared to other communication media.

The EASIT project was founded to fill this gap, with focus on multimodal texts and a broad range of topics from culture and society. On the one hand, it aims to promote professionalism in the production of accessible texts. On the other, it seeks ways to integrate the target groups in the text production process and to foster exchange between them and researchers and practitioners. IO4 is the part of the EASIT project that develops curricula to train experts in the field of accessible communication. The results of IO4 will be presented at the EASIT multiplier event in Hildesheim. Researchers and practitioners as well as members of the target groups, both from Germany and abroad, have been mobilised. They will be discussing their research and experience in producing and using accessible communication products in various media together with possible ways to join efforts in different research constellations and situational contexts. The programme also includes speeches that approach the topic from the view of the end-users, practitioners and researchers.

Please register here: https://www.uni-hildesheim.de/leichtesprache/veranstaltungen/easit-anmeldung-registration/
Places are limited and will be allocated on a first-come-first-serve basis.

Contact email: easit@uni-hildesheim.de

Event venue:
Stiftung Universität Hildesheim
Lübecker Straße 3
31141 Hildesheim
Room L131 (Aula)

The Broadcasting Accessibility Fund announced the provision of $615,330 in grants to five projects focussed on advancing accessibility to broadcasting content for Canadian people with disabilities. Among them is “NER Consumer Evaluator”, which will receive $156,000. This project is leaded by Keeble Media Inc. with the participation of Pablo Romero-Fresco and Sabela Melchor-Couto, members of GALMA. Its aim is to train and certify a number of deaf and hard of hearing consumers in the evaluation of NER, which is a tool for assessing the quality of live captions produced using speech recognition that was developed by Pablo Romero-Fresco (Universidade de Vigo and Roehampton University) and Juan Martínez (a respeaking consultant).

Should you want to know more, do have a look at the press release here.

Pablo Romero-Fresco, director of GALMA, has just returned from Turin (Italy), where he was invited to attend the TorinoFilmLab (TFL) – FeatureLab 3rd Workshop and Meeting Event, which took place between 19-24 November 2019 in parallel with the Torino Film Festival. Pablo hold a lecture on accessible filmmaking and subtitling, organised with TFL’s partner Sub-Ti.

The TFL Meeting Event is the annual showcase of the projects, talents and films developed at the TorinoFilmLab, featuring a global co-production forum for independent original or adapted feature films (with a focus on emerging directors), and a presentation of the professionals trained within the scheme. It is also a moment to reward the best projects with awards and production grants, the TFL Production and TFL Co-Production Awards, as well as collateral prizes.

Pablo Romero-Fresco (Universidade de Vigo and Roehampton University), director of the international research centre GALMA (Galician Observatory for Media Accessibility) and co-author (with Juan Martínez) of the NER model, has just return from Hollywood (US), where he, together with British audio describer Louise Fryer, gave a training course to the translators and filmmakers of Netflix in order to implement accessibility in the filmmaking process.

Dr Romero-Fresco is now collaborating with the American media-services provider and production company in the development of more accessible audiovisual contents, to allow all viewers access to the cinema, regardless of their mother tongues and (dis)abilities.

During his trip in the US, Pablo also participated in the ATA 60th Annual Conference, that took place in Palm Springs (California). He was invited as Distinguished Speaker to give two talks on accessible filmmaking and respeaking.

If you are interested in knowing more about that, please follow this link.

According to an statement by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) issued on November 2, 2016, “Canadians who use and rely on closed captioning to watch English-language television programming should have access to the highest possible quality of closed captioning in live programming.” The CRTC has been working on that since then and, as a result, the Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2019-308 has come to life. A new accuracy rate and measurement model for live programming has been approved stemming from this Regulation. The Commission has established a rate of 98 for English-language live programming, based on the NER model as described in the Canadian NER Evaluation Guidelines.