Introduction: latest advancements in audiovisual translation education

The consumption of audiovisual content, from the more traditional animations, documentaries, movies, and TV shows to the more recent online user-generated content found on social media platforms, including video games, has grown exponentially over the last few decades. The omnipresence of screens in society has led to transformations in audiences’ watching habits, now impatient to enjoy their programmes as soon as possible and inclined to binge watch. Recent technological advances in the production of specialist audiovisual translation (AVT) software and web-based applications have paved the way for further changes and enhancements in the ways professionals localise audiovisual content and in the nature of the services provided. This special issue sheds light on the current teaching and learning practices, methodologies and issues encountered by translator trainers specialised in AVT, with particular emphasis on pedagogical innovation, media accessibility, and translation technology

Accesibilidad y multilingüismo: un estudio exploratorio sobre la traducción automática de descripciones de audio

This article presents the results of an exploratory study which assesses the machine translation of audio descriptions as offering a possible solution to increase accessibility in multilingual environments. Accessibility is understood to encompass two different categories: sensorial accessibility (in this specific case, for the blind and visually impaired, who cannot access the visual content of audiovisual productions), and linguistic accessibility (for those who want to access this content in their own language). The article presents some thoughts on translation as a means of promoting multilingualism, on the feasibility of translating audio descriptions, and on machine translation as applied to this audiovisual translation mode, before summarising the findings of the present study and, most importantly, opening up new potential avenues for research.Este artículo presenta los resultados de un estudio exploratorio que evalúa la traducción automática de audiodescripciones como una posible solución para aumentar la accesibilidad en entornos multilingües. Se entiende que la accesibilidad abarca dos categorías diferentes: accesibilidad sensorial (en este caso específico, para los ciegos y discapacitados visuales, que no pueden acceder al contenido visual de las producciones audiovisuales) y accesibilidad lingüística (para aquellos que quieren acceder a este contenido en su propio idioma). El artículo presenta algunas reflexiones sobre la traducción como medio para promover el multilingüismo, sobre la viabilidad de traducir descripciones de audio y sobre la traducción automática tal y como se aplica a este tipo de traducción audiovisual, antes de sintetizar los hallazgos del presente estudio y, lo que es más importante, abrir la posibilidad de nuevas vías a la investigación

The Symbiotic Match of AVT & Tech Industry State-Of-The-Art and Way Forward

The Audiovisual Translation (AVT) sector and the Tech industry have been inseparable, a symbiotic match. In the AVT field, the introduction of the DVD in 1995 was the most significant development in the field of AVT, profoundly influencing the nature of professional practices. It had «repercussions not only in the way audiovisual programmes started to be packaged, marketed and consumed, but also from a quantitative perspective» (Díaz-Cintas 2013: 119). Yet, the greatest catalyst of changes in communications and AVT has always been the Internet (Díaz-Cintas 2013: 119). In the last decade, the world around us has radically altered. On a daily basis, we are immersed in an audiovisual reality, surrounded by Video Streaming on Demand (SVoD) systems, where players like Netflix spend billions of dollars in new productions reaching volumes of content that were impossible only a decade ago. New experiments with advanced technologies applied to AVT have been consistently carried out since 2000 to meet the demands of SVoD systems: automatic speech recognition (ASR) able to ‘understand’ the voices in a dialogue, and neural machine translation (NMT) processes have been applied to the production of subtitled versions of films and TV shows to a large extent, generating new roles in the industry and creating new debates about the ethics of technology in the AVT industry

Machine translation evaluation through post-editing measures in audio description

Departament de Traducció i InterpretacióThe number of accessible audiovisual products and the pace at which audiovisual content is made accessible need to be increased, reducing costs whenever possible. The implementation of different technologies which are already available in the translation field, specifically machine translation technologies, could help reach this goal in audio description for the blind and partially sighted. Measuring machine translation quality is essential when selecting the most appropriate machine translation engine to be implemented in the audio description field for the English-Catalan language combination. Automatic metrics and human assessments are often used for this purpose in any specific domain and language pair. This article proposes a methodology based on both objective and subjective measures for the evaluation of five different and free online machine translation systems. Their raw machine translation outputs and the post-editing effort that is involved are assessed using eight different scores. Results show that there are clear quality differences among the systems assessed and that one of them is the best rated in six out of the eight evaluation measures used. This engine would therefore yield the best freely machine-translated audio descriptions in Catalan presumably reducing the audio description process turnaround and costs

Embracing the threat: machine translation as a solution for subtitling

Recent decades have brought significant changes in the subtitling industry, both in terms of workflow and in the context of the market for audiovisual translation. Machine translation (MT), whilst in regular use in the traditional localisation industry, has not seen a significant uptake in the subtitling arena. The SUMAT project, an EU-funded project which ran from 2011 to 2014 had as its aim the building and evaluation of viable MT solutions for the subtitling industry in nine bidirectional language pairs. As part of the project, a year-long large-scale evaluation of the output of the resulting MT engines was carried out by trained subtitlers. This paper reports on the impetus behind the investigation of MT for subtitling, previous work in this field, and discusses some of the results of this evaluation, in particular an attempt to measure the extent of productivity gain or loss for subtitlers using machine translation as opposed to working in the traditional way. The paper examines opportunities and limitations of MT as a viable option for work of this nature and makes recommendations for the training of subtitle post-editors

Mapping audiovisual translation investigations : research approaches and the role of technology

This article maps audiovisual translation research by analysing in a contrastive way the abstracts presented at three audiovisual translation conferences ten years ago and nowadays. The comparison deals with the audiovisual transfer modes and topics under discussion, and the approach taken by the authors in their abstracts. The article then shifts the focus to the role of technology in audiovisual translation research, as it is considered an element that is impacting and will continue to impact both research and practice in this field. Relevant research in audio-related, text-related and image-related technologies applied to audiovisual translation is summarised. The last section briefly discusses how technological tools can also help audiovisual translation professionals, users and researcher

The social relevance of research to practice : a study of the impact of academic research on professional subtitling practitioners in Europe

The relevance of research to practice has long been debated and in recent years, the topic has returned to prominence as academics are increasingly required to demonstrate the impact of their scholarly activity outwith the academy. As the field of Audiovisual Translation is now firmly established as a sub-discipline of Translation Studies and digitalisation has fundamentally transformed subtitling practice, it is timely to explore the contribution that academic endeavours in subtitling make to its professional practice. Work to date has been based on argumentation, with scant empirical evidence and lacking the practitioner’s perspective. This study aims to investigate the extent to which academic research in subtitling impacts on professional practice. This mixed method, participant-oriented research surveyed subtitling practitioners in Europe to generate empirical data on the topic for the first time. Drawing on the sociology of the professions and the emerging field of Research Impact, this thesis deconstructs the relationship between research and practice to provide a systematic analysis of the impact of research on practice, based on the professional reality of subtitling practitioners. It highlights shortcomings in previous conceptualisations of research relevance to practice and the findings move the debate from a falsely dichotomous ‘theory versus practice’ argument towards a revised definition which accounts for a wider, more nuanced understanding of impact. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for academia, practice, industry and pedagogy

The social relevance of research to practice : a study of the impact of academic research on professional subtitling practitioners in Europe

The relevance of research to practice has long been debated and in recent years, the topic has returned to prominence as academics are increasingly required to demonstrate the impact of their scholarly activity outwith the academy. As the field of Audiovisual Translation is now firmly established as a sub-discipline of Translation Studies and digitalisation has fundamentally transformed subtitling practice, it is timely to explore the contribution that academic endeavours in subtitling make to its professional practice. Work to date has been based on argumentation, with scant empirical evidence and lacking the practitioner’s perspective. This study aims to investigate the extent to which academic research in subtitling impacts on professional practice. This mixed method, participant-oriented research surveyed subtitling practitioners in Europe to generate empirical data on the topic for the first time. Drawing on the sociology of the professions and the emerging field of Research Impact, this thesis deconstructs the relationship between research and practice to provide a systematic analysis of the impact of research on practice, based on the professional reality of subtitling practitioners. It highlights shortcomings in previous conceptualisations of research relevance to practice and the findings move the debate from a falsely dichotomous ‘theory versus practice’ argument towards a revised definition which accounts for a wider, more nuanced understanding of impact. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for academia, practice, industry and pedagogy