Testing the retranslation hypothesis for audiovisual translation: the films of Volker Schlöndorff subtitled into English

This article uses the Descriptive Translation Studies framework to examine the English subtitles for two German films directed by Volker Schlöndorff: Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum [The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum], directed in 1975, and Die Blechtrommel [The Tin Drum], from 1979, with a view to testing the earliest formulation of the retranslation hypothesis. Using the concept of translational norms as one of its main heuristic tools, this research examines an audiovisual corpus consisting of five different sets of DVD subtitles from the two films: three from Die Blechtrommel, dating from 1995, 2002 and 2010, and two from Katharina Blum, dated 2003 and 2009, thus spanning the era from the advent of digitisation and the beginning of DVD to the rise of TV and film streaming services. The data is analysed to investigate the orientation, in terms of source culture or target culture, of the translation strategies that have been activated by the subtitlers when encountering culture-specific references, and then to pinpoint any diachronic trends that come to the fore. The analysis concludes that the retranslation hypothesis does not apply in this corpus; possible reasons for this finding are discussed

Machine translation for subtitling: a large-scale evaluation

This article describes a large-scale evaluation of the use of Statistical Machine Translation for professional subtitling. The work was carried out within the FP7 EU-funded project SUMAT and involved two rounds of evaluation: a quality evaluation and a measure of productivity gain/loss. We present the SMT systems built for the project and the corpora they were trained on, which combine professionally created and crowd-sourced data. Evaluation goals, methodology and results are presented for the eleven translation pairs that were evaluated by professional subtitlers. Overall, a majority of the machine translated subtitles received good quality ratings. The results were also positive in terms of productivity, with a global gain approaching 40%. We also evaluated the impact of applying quality estimation and filtering of poor MT output, which resulted in higher productivity gains for filtered files as opposed to fully machine-translated files. Finally, we present and discuss feedback from the subtitlers who participated in the evaluation, a key aspect for any eventual adoption of machine translation technology in professional subtitlin

Preventive evidence into practice (PEP) study: implementation of guidelines to prevent primary vascular disease in general practice protocol for a cluster randomised controlled trial

There are significant gaps in the implementation and uptake of evidence-based guideline recommendations for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and diabetes in Australian general practice. This study protocol describes the methodology for a cluster randomised trial to evaluate the effectiveness of a model that aims to improve the implementation of these guidelines in Australian general practice developed by a collaboration between researchers, non-government organisations, and the profession.This study is funded by an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Partnership grant (ID 568978) together with the Australian National Heart Foundation, Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, and the BUPA Foundation. MH is supported by a NHMRC Senior Principle Research Fellowship

Lindsay Bywood interviews Carol Robertson on her experience of the early days of subtitling at the BBC

Lindsay Bywood interviews Carol Robertson on her experience of the early days of subtitling at the BBC

Technology and Audiovisual Translation

Without technology, it could be argued, there would be no audiovisual translation (AVT), as the source material for such translation is generally a piece of audiovisual media of some description, itself technical in nature, and audiovisual translators need technology to create their translations and to enable their translations to be received by viewers. This chapter provides an overview of the current relationship between technology and the various areas of AVT, covering its application in subtitling, dubbing, workflow software and the technological considerations involved in working with audiovisual source and target texts. A critical overview of the application of machine translation (MT) and machine learning to this sector is also offered

MT in subtitling and the rising profile of the post-editor

In the article, the authors focus on the application of machine translation in the subtitling industry. It adds that demand of subtitle professionals and subtitling services have increased. It mentions that SUMAT, an online service for subtitling by machine translation, as a big tool that offers the ability to upload and download subtitle files in a number of industry standard formats by users such as freelancers and multinational companies