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

Audiovisual translation and media accessibility in language learning contexts

The integration of audiovisual translation (AVT), in its multiple forms (i.e., interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic, Jakobson 1959) and modes (revoicing and subtitling), with a key focus on multimodality have found their way more recently in the foreign language education (FLE) context. If subtitles and subtitling remain a hugely discussed topic in their pedagogical application (see Díaz-Cintas and Wang 2022), over recent years studies about didactic AVT have definitely enlarged their scope and come to comprise the various AVT techniques that can be used in the classroom as a motivating booster of language learning, since, especially in active practices, the learner is really at the centre of his/her learning process. Current research on didactic AVT shares the premises that this kind of translation is beneficial not only as a complex problem-solving activity triggering integrated skills as well as critical thinking, but also as a multisensorial and intersemiotic experience demanding a holistic approach, which fosters sociopragmatic competences and intercultural awareness in learners (Incalcaterra McLoughlin, and Talaván 2018). In the past twenty years, one of the most innovative and promising fields within AVT has been Media Accessibility (MA) research and practice, in line with the urgent need of providing accessible and inclusive services to all members of society (Díaz-Cintas, Orero, and Remael 2007). The great potentials of MA tools, including SDH and AD addressed to the aurally and visually impaired audiences respectively, also started to attract the interest of scholars in AVT in language learning. Learning a language by learning to translate, as well as by reflecting on translation(s) through media resources, has certainly gained a specific status in the ongoing “new relationships” between translation and contemporary language teaching (Koletnik and Froeliger 2019). However, while a lot has been achieved in AVT, there is much still to explore and learn

Double responsibility of foreign language teachers: Primary student-teachers’ perceptions of linguistic and cultural content

Scholars all over the world have been arguing for foreign language instruction which combines linguistic and cultural content. Eliminating the cultural side results in a deficient process. This study explored prospective teachers’ perceptions of both constituents, since they will ultimately be responsible for their implementation in the foreign language classroom. To this end, 137 students from three European universities were chosen and asked to fill out an online questionnaire with Likert scale items. Data was collected and interpreted using the free statistics software package R (R Core Team, 2019). The findings confirmed that the relevance of linguistic / cultural issues was unanimously acknowledged (98,5%), speaking was appointed as the most desired target skill (97,1%), interpersonal relations (88,3%) as the most important aspect of socio-cultural knowledge, and lessons with native speakers (94,2%) as the most relevant classroom resourc

An action-oriented approach to didactic dubbing in foreign language education: Students as producers

This article discusses the action-oriented foundations of TRADILEX (Audiovisual Translation as a Didactic Resource in Foreign Language Education), a project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, which involves researchers from twelve universities across Europe and the UK. This project focuses on the improvement in the linguistic skills perceived through audiovisual translation (AVT) practices such as the use of captioning (i.e., interlingual and intralingual subtitling) and revoicing (i.e., dubbing, voice-over, and audio description) through an actionoriented approach (AoA). The ultimate objective is the study of AVT as a means to enhance learners’ communicative competence and reception, production, and mediation skills in an integrated manner. Following the design of a methodological proposal for a didactic sequence of AVT tasks, proposals are currently being piloted with B1 and B2 adult learners of English as a foreign language utilising – and adapting – the recent illustrative descriptors (Council of Europe, 2018) for AVT instruction. The potential benefits of action-oriented AVT tasks in foreign language education (FLE), in which foreign-language learners become active producers of AVT work, are put to the test employing empirical inquiry and thereafter advocating for more comprehensive integration of AVT in the FLE curriculum overall

Uncertainty in deliberate lexical interventions

Language managers in their different forms (language planners, terminologists, professional neologists …) have long tried to intervene in the lexical usage of speakers, with various degrees of success: Some of their lexical items (partly) penetrate language use, others do not. Based on electronic networks of practice of the Esperanto speech community, Mélanie Maradan establishes the foundation for a new method to extract speakers’ opinions on lexical items from text corpora. The method is intended as a tool for language managers to detect and explore in context the reasons why speakers might accept or reject lexical items. Mélanie Maradan holds a master’s degree in translation and terminology from the University of Geneva/Switzerland as well as a joint doctoral degree in multilingual information processing and philosophy (Dr. phil.) from the universities of Geneva and Hildesheim/Germany. Her research interests include planned languages (Esperanto studies) as well as neology and corpus linguistics. She works as a professional translator and terminologist in Switzerland

English as a Lingua Franca for Tourism: A Pragmatic Study in the Italian Context

This thesis is a pragmatic study of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication in the special language domain of tourism. It explores overt, covert, and translanguaging practices to define how they foster communicative functions. Furthermore, the multiculturality of the research community object of the study will provide evidence of an original human cluster defined as an intercommunicating group of speakers (IGS). Capturing their stance-taking towards English as a Lingua Franca use will contribute to clarifying its iconic social meaning (Coupland 2007). The study adopts an ethnographic perspective to exemplify the dynamic nature of negotiation in language interaction and the power and cultural relations behind it. Furthermore, it combines the Ethnography of Communication with a microanalytic approach - Conversation Analysis. The triangulation of data deriving from an emic point of observation with an etic one detailed the speakers’ multilingual complex and expanded linguistic repertoire (Cogo 2012). It has also acknowledged their attitudes and orientations towards ELF communication, including the central aspects of stance-taking. In detail, my original data includes naturally occurring conversations among the 22 participants in the tour, comprising specialist tourist staff operators of different ages and educational backgrounds and non-expert visitors. The analysis was supported by interviews and questionnaire surveys conducted among participants (for their transcriptions and detailed analysis, see Parise 2022). In conclusion, this investigation explores ELF communication in an Italian tourism context to support Jenkins’s (2015) multilingual view of ELF communication. Conceivably, it will provide evidence of the strategic and dynamical use of speakers’ multilingual repertoires used as pragmatic strategies (i.e., the pedagogical function, the interpersonal function, the interpreting function) to accomplish complex social and cognitive activities in the Italian Tourist Industry. Furthermore, the investigation longitudinal participant-observation perspective allowed to define the participants as an intercommunicating group of speakers (IGS) since stabler than a TIG (transient international group)1 (see Pitzl 2016a: 25) or an example of TMC (Transient Multilingual Communities)2 (see Mortensen and Hazel 2017: 256), but more transient than a CoP in Wenger’s sense (1998). Finally, their stance observation will contribute to sociolinguistic theory investigating individual speaker/group dynamics

An Action-oriented Approach to Didactic Audio Description in Foreign Language Education

This paper introduces the action-oriented foundations of TRADILEX (Audiovisual Translation as a Didactic Resource in Foreign Language Education), a project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation which involves researchers from twelve universities across Europe and the UK. TRADILEX sets out to gather data on the improvement in the linguistic skills perceived through the use of captioning (i.e., interlingual and intralingual subtitling) and revoicing (i.e., dubbing, voice-over and audio description) through an action-oriented approach (AoA). In order to enhance learners’ communicative competence, as well as reception, production and mediation skills in an integrated manner, a methodological proposal for a didactic sequence of audiovisual translation (AVT) tasks has been developed. This methodological proposal is currently being piloted with B1 and B2 adult learners of English as a foreign language utilising – and adapting – the recent illustrative descriptors (Council of Europe 2018) for AVT instruction. This research effort sets out to better understand and evaluate the potential benefits of action-oriented AVT tasks in foreign language education (FLE). This project advocates for a wider integration of AVT in the FLE curriculum, thus fostering visual literacy and mediation skills, whilst promoting an active use of AVT practices and technologies in the classroom.Este artículo expone los principios fundamentales del enfoque orientado a la acción del proyecto TRADILEX (Traducción Audiovisual en el Aprendizaje de Lenguas Extranjeras) que financia el Ministerio de Educación, Ciencia e Innovación de España y que reúne a investigadores de doce universidades europeas y británicas. El objetivo de TRADILEX es el de reunir los datos necesarios para estudiar la mejora de las habilidades lingüísticas con el uso de subtitulado (tanto inter como intralingüístico) y doblaje (así como las voces superpuestas y la audiodescripción) con un enfoque orientado a la acción. La propuesta metodológica, compuesta de tareas de traducción audiovisual (TAV) que se presenta busca que el estudiante pueda progresar en el desarrollo de sus competencias comunicativas, así como en sus destrezas de recepción, producción y mediación lingüísticas, de una manera integrada. Dicha metodología se encuentra actualmente en fase de pilotaje con estudiantes adultos de niveles B1 y B2 de inglés como lengua extrajera y ajusta a los descriptores publicados recientemente por el Consejo de Europea (2008) a la enseñanza de la TAV. Con este artículo, se examinan las posibles ventajas de la enseñanza de la TAV desde un enfoque orientado a la acción en el marco de la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras. El proyecto persigue, en última instancia, una mayor integración de la TAV en los programas de lenguas extranjeras para el desarrollo de destrezas de mediación y habilidades relacionadas con lo audiovisual a la vez que se promueven las tareas de TAV activas y el uso de tecnologías en el aula

Uncertainty in deliberate lexical interventions

Language managers in their different forms (language planners, terminologists, professional neologists …) have long tried to intervene in the lexical usage of speakers, with various degrees of success: Some of their lexical items (partly) penetrate language use, others do not. Based on electronic networks of practice of the Esperanto speech community, Mélanie Maradan establishes the foundation for a new method to extract speakers’ opinions on lexical items from text corpora. The method is intended as a tool for language managers to detect and explore in context the reasons why speakers might accept or reject lexical items. Mélanie Maradan holds a master’s degree in translation and terminology from the University of Geneva/Switzerland as well as a joint doctoral degree in multilingual information processing and philosophy (Dr. phil.) from the universities of Geneva and Hildesheim/Germany. Her research interests include planned languages (Esperanto studies) as well as neology and corpus linguistics. She works as a professional translator and terminologist in Switzerland

Universality in Accessibility for All

Accessibility has been facing several challenges within Audiovisual Translation Studies and has also gained great opportunities for its establishment as a methodologically and theoretically well-founded discipline. Audiovisual translation modes have achieved a crucial role in the transmission of what scholarly studies have discussed in relation to media accessibility as a set of services and practices providing access to audiovisual media content for persons with sensory impairment. Today accessibility has become a concept involving more and more universality, since it is extensively contributing to the dissemination of audiovisual and visual products about issues on minorities, and also addressing all human beings, regardless of cultural and social differences. Against this theoretical backdrop, accessibility is scrutinised within the context of aesthetics of marginalisation, migration, and minorities as modalities which encourage the diffusion of 'niche' knowledge, and as universal processes of translation and interpretation that 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 for interlingual translation and subtitling applied to museum contexts of marginalisation, migration and minorities. Drawing upon well-established research in the field of audiovisual translation and media accessibility, and by adopting systemic-functional and lexical-semantic methodological approaches for translation quality assessment of museum text types, this study aims to put emphasis on accessibility as a societal instrument that contributes to giving voice to minorities through knowledge dissemination in English as a lingua franca by means of aesthetic narrative types within the field of the visual arts (i.e. museum settings). In this sense, accessibility is viewed as the embodiment of universality that ensures universal access to knowledge for all citizens as a human rights principle, while acting as an agent for the democratisation and transparency of information against media discourse distortions and oversimplifications

Design of a Controlled Language for Critical Infrastructures Protection

We describe a project for the construction of controlled language for critical infrastructures protection (CIP). This project originates from the need to coordinate and categorize the communications on CIP at the European level. These communications can be physically represented by official documents, reports on incidents, informal communications and plain e-mail. We explore the application of traditional library science tools for the construction of controlled languages in order to achieve our goal. Our starting point is an analogous work done during the sixties in the field of nuclear science known as the Euratom Thesaurus.JRC.G.6-Security technology assessmen