GALMA members are providing training in pre-recorded subtitling and respeaking for the Ai-Media team in Canada. The course, which is mainly practical, even though it includes some thereorical aspects trainees have to master, runs for four weeks and delves into respeaking with Dragon, as well as on subtitle creation using WinCaps.

Dr Pablo Romero-Fresco, director of GALMA, has recently talked to AppTek, a US software company specialising in artificial intelligence and machine learning for automatic speech recognition and machine translation. Should you want to know more about it, do have a look at the following two blog entries, where you can get a taste of the state of live captioning today.

GALMA participates in the two-year research network “ALMA – Red de excelencia sobre I+D+i para accesibilidad y lenguas minoritarias en los medios audiovisuales” (Research network on research, development and innovation for accessibility and minority languages in the media). The research proposal, which was very well appreciated by the selection panel, will receive funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under the Spanish Agency for Research.

The latest issue of JoSTrans: The Journal of Specialised Translation is out. This special issue on experimental research in Audiovisual Translation, edited by Jorge Díaz Cintas (University College London) and Agnieszka Szarkowska (University of Warsaw), includes some exciting contributions from the members of GALMA and the ILSA project. Read on!

Interlingual Live Subtitling for Access (ILSA) is a three-year (September 2017-August 2020) project co-financed by the European Union under the Erasmus+ Programme, Key Action 2 – Cooperation for Innovation and the Exchange of Good Practices, KA203 – Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education (reference number 2017-1-ES01-KA203-037948).

As a strategic partnership promoting open and innovative practices in the digital era, ILSA will identify the skills and profile of a new professional, the interlingual live subtitler (ILSer), develop, test and validate the first training course on interlingual live subtitling (ILS) and provide a protocol for the implementation of this discipline in three real-life scenarios, namely TV, political/social settings and the classroom.

Practitioners and educators in the fields of accessibility, audiovisual translation and interpreting studies are invited to join this event on interlingual live subtitling and speech-to-text interpreting as new ways of achieving access and barrier-free communication.

The programme will feature progress reports by members of the ILSA project group and presentations by educators and practitioners as well as a panel discussion with specialists and stakeholder representatives. It will be held at the University of Antwerp – City Campus on July 2nd, 2020.

For further information, please contact Isabelle Robert (isabelle.robert@uantwerpen.be).

The Unlimited! conferences are an opportunity to discuss research, practice, policy and technological innovation regarding the accessibility of live events and broadcasts. Stakeholders from varying backgrounds and domains come together to pinpoint challenges, share best practices and explore convergences and new collaborations about a growing range of services and products that make live events and broadcasts more accessible for diverse audiences.

The third Unlimited! conference Innovation for Access: New Interactions, following successful conferences in 2016 (University of Antwerp) and 2018 (Autonomous University of Barcelona), would like to pay tribute to the new opportunities created by innovation, and will explore new developments in access services including audio description, audio surtitling, audio subtitling, surtitling for the hearing impaired, and sign language. It will be hosted by the OPEN Expertise Centre for Accessible Media and Culture and the TricS research group of the University of Antwerp on July 2nd and 3rd, 2020 at its City Campus.

Should you want to know more about the conference, do have a look at its website.

We are very pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the 2nd Understanding Media Accessibility Quality (UMAQ) Conference, which will be held in Vigo (Spain) on Thursday, 17 September and Friday, 18 September 2020.

The UMAQ Conference seeks to explore the ways in which the different stakeholders involved in the media accessibility and audiovisual translation value chain (such as researchers, industry, policy-makers and organisations of end-users) tackle the issue of quality. Do have a look at the conference website to find more information about the UMAQ Conference, including the Call for Papers, important dates, abstract submission, information about the venue and the city, etc.

Abstracts should be submitted through EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=umaq20). They should be no longer than 300 words, and include up to 5 keywords.

We look forward to welcoming you in Vigo.

The latest issue of Linguistica Antverpiensia: New Series – Themes in Translation Studies, on Media Accessibility Training, is out. It includes some exciting papers from the members of the GALMA and the ILSA project. Read on!

• “Training in Accessible Filmmaking“, by Pablo Romero-Fresco
• “Live subtitlers: Who are they? A survey study“, by Isabelle Robert, Iris Schrijver & Ella Diels
• “New efforts? A competence-oriented task analysis of interlingual live subtitling“, by Franz Pöchhacker & Aline Remael
• “A project-based approach to subtitler training“, by Agnieszka Szarkowska
• “Respeaking certification: Bringing together training, research and practice“, by Pablo Romero-Fresco, Sabela Melchor-Couto, Hayley Dawson, Zoe Moores & Inma Pedregosa

GALMA has been asked to join the board of the Global Alliance of Speech-to-Text-Captioning, a nonprofit corporation which is aiming to be the “leading professional authority on speech-to-text captioning, representing all captioners, consumers, and industry.” This organisation “exists to represent all captioners, regardless of how they produce captions or how their captions are used; all consumers, regardless of where they use captions and how; and all industry, regardless of size, history, or location.”