Interlingual Live Subtitling for Access Erasmus Project

Project Title

Interlingual Live Subtitling for Access

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Open and distance learning; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Inclusion – equity

Project Summary

Audiovisual translation and media accessibility have become drivers of social inclusion and have lately received recognition in the literature and in EU-funded projects. In the area of live subtitling, the preferred technique is respeaking, where subtitlers listen to the original soundtrack of a programme or public event and simultaneously repeat/rephrase what they hear to a speech recognition software that turns these words into same-language subtitles, mostly for viewers with hearing loss. Now, a new challenge has emerged, as migration streams and the increased multilingual composition of societies have led to a growing demand for accessibility to live audiovisual content and events conducted in a foreign language. This is even more pressing and relevant in the current pandemic, where live translation and accessibility for online events is a must. It is thus crucial to find trained professionals who can produce interlingual live subtitles and who, until now, have been few far between. ILSA set out to fill this gap by introducing and developing a new discipline, interlingual speech-to-text interpreting through respeaking, which brings together translation, subtitling and simultaneous interpreting.

The ILSA project revolved around seven intellectual outputs (IOs) to achieve its main priority: to develop the new professional profile of the interlingual live subtitler (ILSer). This included an assessment of the current live subtitling practice and training (IO1), on which ILSA built; the identification of the subtitling, interpreting and respeaking skills required for the job (IO2, IO3); the development, assessment and validation of a specialised training course and its materials (IO4, IO5, IO6,IO7); and the creation of a protocol/guidelines to transfer the project results to society for the implementation of interlingual live subtitling (ILS) on TV, in the classroom and in live events (IO7).

ILSA’s intercultural mission required transnational cooperation and a wide scope including a variety of languages (English, Spanish, Galician, Dutch, German and Polish), language situations (monolingual and bilingual countries) and audiovisual translation traditions (dubbing, subtitling, voice-over). The combination of educational (University of Vigo, University of Vienna, University of Warsaw & University of Antwerp) and non-educational partners (VRT [broadcaster] and INTRO PR [access service provider]) facilitated bottom-up transectorial collaboration for the creation of the new profile and training course as well as for the implementation of ILS in the said contexts.

The key project results are the reports on how same-language live subtitling is currently trained and implemented around the world and what skills are required for the new profession (ILS), the guidelines for the implementation of ILS and especially the ILSA course. The latter, based on the empirical results obtained in IOs 1 and 2, is the first online ILS course in the world, available for free at https://tinyurl.com/y687vhs7 (email | ka2-ilsa@uvigo.es and password | ILSAtester2019). The training materials can be accessed on the project website: ka2-ilsa.webs.uvigo.es/course-and-training-materials/. The University partners in the project have set up their first ILS programmes (with a duration ranging from 2 months to 1 year) based on the ILSA course. Other universities have adapted their training programmes to incorporate ILSA materials or the ILSA course, including the University of Roehampton (UK), Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona and the European University of Valencia (Spain), whereas others such as Macquarie University (Australia) and the University of Helsinki (Finland) have created ILSA-based bespoke training courses. The ILSA course has also been used to train the Canadian staff of Ai-Media, the leading company providing speech-to-text solutions for broadcast, government, education and corporate clients worldwide.

The results of the ILSA project (and especially the course and the guidelines) have already had significant impact on governments, companies, universities and users worldwide. Some examples include the integration of an ILSA-based quality assessment model into the official Canadian legislation on accessibility, an on-going collaboration on live subtitling with the UK’s governmental regulator Ofcom, a partnership with the companies Ai-Media and TranscriptionStar for the first-ever provision of ILS services (by ILSA trainees) in the US and Australia, the provision of an ILSA-based training course to Netflix in their LA offices, the creation (with ILSA’s researchers as founding members) of the Global Alliance for Speech-to-Text Captioning and the presentation of ILS in countries where it had not been introduced, such as Qatar, Russia, Turkey, Uruguay or Chile. The map available on the ILSA website provides a detailed account of the long-term impact of the project in 25 countries worldwide (see also subsection 6.1 of this report).

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 245486,48 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSIDAD DE VIGO & Country: ES

Project Partners

• Parliament of Galicia
• UNIVERSITAT WIEN
• UNIVERSITEIT ANTWERPEN
• INTRO PR Sp. z o.o.
• DE VLAAMSE RADIO EN TELEVISIEOMROEPORGANISATIE NV
• UNIWERSYTET WARSZAWSKI