Museums as disseminators of niche knowledge: Universality in accessibility for all

Accessibility has faced several challenges within audiovisual translation Studies and gained great opportunities for its establishment as a methodologically and theoretically well-founded discipline. Initially conceived as a set of services and practices that provides access to audiovisual media content for persons with sensory impairment, today accessibility can be viewed as a concept involving more and more universality thanks to its contribution to the dissemination of audiovisual products on the topic of marginalisation. Against this theoretical backdrop, accessibility is scrutinised from the perspective of aesthetics of migration and minorities within the field of the visual arts in museum settings. These aesthetic narrative forms act as modalities that encourage the diffusion of ‘niche’ knowledge, where processes of translation and interpretation provide access to all knowledge as counter discourse. Within this framework, the ways in which language is used can be considered the beginning of a type of local grammar in English as lingua franca for interlingual translation and subtitling, both of which ensure access to knowledge for all citizens as a human rights principle and regardless of cultural and social differences. Accessibility is thus gaining momentum as an agent for the democratisation and transparency of information against media discourse distortions and oversimplifications

Stylization and representation in subtitles: can less be more?

This article considers film dialogues and interlingual subtitles from the point of view of linguistic and cultural representation, and revisits from that perspective the question of loss, as a platform for considering alternative views on the topic and broader theoretical issues. The cross-cultural pragmatics perspective and focus on viewers’ reactions that dealing with representation entails cast the question of loss in a different light and opens up avenues for alternative modes of analysis. They make room for subtitles to be construed as producing their own systems of multimodal textual representation and modes of interpretation, and for their text to be recognised as having a greater expressive and representational potential than face values might suggest. This is the argument, informed by Fowler's Theory of Mode (1991, 2000), that is taken up in the paper, and harnessed to the review of examples or observations from recent studies on subtitles, and complementary evidence from dubbing. The capacity of subtitles to produce insights into the cultures and languages represented is of particular interest, and has wider implications for the culturally instrumental functions of subtitles and translation strategies

Dodging the Data Bottleneck: Automatic Subtitling with Automatically Segmented ST Corpora

Speech translation for subtitling (SubST) is the task of automatically translating speech data into well-formed subtitles by inserting subtitle breaks compliant to specific displaying guidelines. Similar to speech translation (ST), model training requires parallel data comprising audio inputs paired with their textual translations. In SubST, however, the text has to be also annotated with subtitle breaks. So far, this requirement has represented a bottleneck for system development, as confirmed by the dearth of publicly available SubST corpora. To fill this gap, we propose a method to convert existing ST corpora into SubST resources without human intervention. We build a segmenter model that automatically segments texts into proper subtitles by exploiting audio and text in a multimodal fashion, achieving high segmentation quality in zero-shot conditions. Comparative experiments with SubST systems respectively trained on manual and automatic segmentations result in similar performance, showing the effectiveness of our approach

Dodging the Data Bottleneck: Automatic Subtitling with Automatically Segmented ST Corpora

Speech translation for subtitling (SubST) is the task of automatically translating speech data into well-formed subtitles by inserting subtitle breaks compliant to specific displaying guidelines. Similar to speech translation (ST), model training requires parallel data comprising audio inputs paired with their textual translations. In SubST, however, the text has to be also annotated with subtitle breaks. So far, this requirement has represented a bottleneck for system development, as confirmed by the dearth of publicly available SubST corpora. To fill this gap, we propose a method to convert existing ST corpora into SubST resources without human intervention. We build a segmenter model that automatically segments texts into proper subtitles by exploiting audio and text in a multimodal fashion, achieving high segmentation quality in zero-shot conditions. Comparative experiments with SubST systems respectively trained on manual and automatic segmentations result in similar performance, showing the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: Accepted to AACL 202

Operating between Cultures and Langugages: Multilingual Films in Foreign Language Classes

Our societies have undergone two major changes during the last decades: firstly, the continuous rise of cultural and linguistic diversity, due to the global economy, migration and universal mobility, and secondly, the steady expansion and gathering impetus of the new communication media (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, 2012). In consequence, multilingualism, acquired or learned, has shaped our living together and pertains to our learners in the classroom. Similarly, polyglot movies, literatures and other cultural productions have become symbolic expressions for worldwide cross-cultural movements for all age groups. Both the multilingualism and the multi-/transculturalism inherent in the texts and images constitute a rich cultural resource for the Foreign Language (FL) classroom. This article argues that the creative potential of transnational film, to be found in its multilingualism and transculturalism, should be used as a complementary field of teaching film beyond the traditional and curriculum-bound (English only) English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom in Germany and therefore supports multicultural, multilingual and multimodal learning. The article uses examples from Quentin Ta­rantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), Gonzalez Iñarritu’s Babel (2012) and Wim Wenders’ documentary Pina (2011)

Audiovisual translation as a didactic resource in foreign language education. A methodological proposal.

This paper presents a methodological proposal designed by the TRADILEX project, which stands for Audiovisual Translation as a Didactic Resource in Foreign Language Education. The main goal of TRADILEX is to determine the degree of improvement in the foreign language learning process after including the pedagogical use of audiovisual translation (AVT) as a didactic tool. To this end, a methodological proposal has been articulated including complete lesson plans which make use of diverse AVT modes (subtitling, voice-over, dubbing, audio description and subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing) in order to enhance communicative competence and mediation skills in an integrated and differentiated manner. The methodology designed by TRADILEX will be piloted with B1-B2-level English as a foreign language adult students in non-formal educational contexts, especially in language centres of the universities involved. Both the methodological proposal of didactic sequence, based on the pedagogical use of the main AVT modes, and a sample lesson plan on subtitling, will be described in this paper to present the basic elements that underlie this research project

Museums for all: translation and interpreting for multimodal spaces as a tool for universal accessibility

Audiovisual Translation (AVT) has a scientific responsibility to develop analytical methodologies for the textual phenomenon of multimodality, and for the translation strategies associated with it. At the same time, it should aim to provide studies of universal accessibility with a powerful tool for facilitating access to knowledge. This article offers some reflections on the theoretical foundations of AVT and considers how these are projected in the creation of new professional profiles, with specific application to universal accessibility in the museums.La Traducción Audiovisual (TAV) tiene la responsabilidad científica de desarrollar metodologías de análisis para el fenómeno textual de la multimodalidad así como para sus estrategias de traducción, a la vez que ha de proporcionar a los estudios en accesibilidad universal una poderosa herramienta de acceso al conocimiento. Este artículo ofrece reflexiones en torno a los fundamentos teóricos de la TAV y a la proyección de estos en nuevos perfiles profesionales; todo ello aplicado a la accesibilidad museística universal.This article is the English version of “Museos para todos. La traducción e interpretación para entornos multimodales como herramienta de accesibilidad universal” by Catalina Jiménez Hurtado, Claudia Seibel & Silvia Soler Gallego. It was not published on the print version of MonTI for reasons of space. The online version of MonTI does not suffer from these limitations, and this is our way of promoting plurilingualism.AMATRA Project (P07-SEJ/2660)

Rendering multilingualism through audio subtitles : shaping a categorisation for aural strategies

Multilingualism in films has increased in recent productions as a reflection of today's globalised word. Different translation transfer modes such as dubbing or subtitling are combined to maintain the film's multilingual essence when translated into other languages. Within media accessibility, audio subtitles, an aurally-rendered version of written subtitles, is used to make access possible for audiences with vision or reading difficulties. By taking Sternberg's representation of polylingualism (1981. Polylingualism as reality and translation as mimesis. Poetics Today, 2(4), 221-239), this article offers a categorisation of the strategies that may be used to reveal multilingualism in audiovisual content through audio subtitles similar to the way Szarkowska, Zbikowska, & Krejtz (2013. Subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing in multilingual films. International Journal of Multilingualism, 10(3), 292-312) did with subtitles for the deaf and the hard of hearing. By taking a descriptive approach, two main strategies or effects for the delivery of audio subtitles - dubbing and voice-over - are highlighted and explained. By combining these two effects with the information provided by the audio description, the levels of the categorisation are defined from more to less multilingualism-revealing: vehicular matching, selective reproduction, verbal transposition, explicit attribution and homogenising convention

Subtitling and dubbing in telecinematic text

This contribution focuses on audiovisual translation (AVT) and the relatively neglected domain of subtitling and dubbing in telecinematic text from a pragmatic perspective, in effect cross-cultural by dint of the interlingual transfer involved. AVT language is fictional language, with the additional twist of mediating text and meaning across languages and cultures in a multimodal context in which source and target remain intertextually linked. The chapter provides an overview of the main aspects involved in engaging with AVT from this perspective, and of the two main domains in which pragmatics has been represented within it: narrative aspects and characterization, and communicative practices in their interlingual representations. Audience design, stance, voice, versimilitude are key features for AVT in the pragmatics of its fiction, as in fiction in general. They are uniquely modulated in AVT by the idiosyncratic features of translation modalities, in ways which are yet to be fully mapped out

MuST-Cinema: a Speech-to-Subtitles corpus

Growing needs in localising audiovisual content in multiple languages through subtitles call for the development of automatic solutions for human subtitling. Neural Machine Translation (NMT) can contribute to the automatisation of subtitling, facilitating the work of human subtitlers and reducing turn-around times and related costs. NMT requires high-quality, large, task-specific training data. The existing subtitling corpora, however, are missing both alignments to the source language audio and important information about subtitle breaks. This poses a significant limitation for developing efficient automatic approaches for subtitling, since the length and form of a subtitle directly depends on the duration of the utterance. In this work, we present MuST-Cinema, a multilingual speech translation corpus built from TED subtitles. The corpus is comprised of (audio, transcription, translation) triplets. Subtitle breaks are preserved by inserting special symbols. We show that the corpus can be used to build models that efficiently segment sentences into subtitles and propose a method for annotating existing subtitling corpora with subtitle breaks, conforming to the constraint of length.Comment: Accepted at LREC 202