Round Table 1: Audiovisual Translator Training: Challenges in an Ever-changing Landscape
Convenor: Elena Di Giovanni
Speakers: Beatriz Cerezo Merchan - Dionysios Kapsaksis - Pilar Orero - Josélia Neves - Iwona Mazur

ABSTRACTS

Beatriz CEREZO MERCHAN
Audiovisual Translation in Spain: A descriptive case study

There is no doubt that this is the century of technology and that we live in a society in which audiovisual aids are our main means of communication, of leisure… Everyday, we are in contact with audiovisual products that have originally been created in a language different to ours and that have gone through a process of translation.
The audiovisual translation (AVT) market is expanding all over the world. Therefore, there is an increasing need to train future professional audiovisual translators. The academic world has echoed this need and in the last few years research studies and training programmes in AVT have multiplied.
The increase of AVT training programmes at university, together with the Bologna Process proposal of revising and reforming educational systems in all European countries, make this an ideal moment to analyse the current state of AVT training at the tertiary level.
This paper presents the methodology and preliminary results of a descriptive case study on AVT university training in Spain. In order to carry out this study, we have consulted with academics, employers and graduates from the AVT world in Spain through a number of interviews and questionnaires. Furthermore, we have conducted a content analysis of AVT course syllabi being taught in Spanish universities. Our aims are to triangulate the data gathered by these research tools in order to perform an intersection among what is taught at university, what is demanded by the market regarding the professional profiles audiovisual translators must have, and what professional translators do in their daily work, and to put forward some proposals for the improvement of the Spanish AVT university training.

Dionysios KAPSAKSIS
Translation and globalisation: New challenges in translation training

This presentation will look into new challenges in translator training in view of the increasingly globalised landscape of translation. Over the past ten years, there has been a sharp rise in global demand for media translation and a proliferation of new types of linguistic transfer in which translators are expected to be competent. Sub-editing, story-editing, re-writing, proof-reading, localisation are some of the skills now required of translators, in addition to audiovisual translation and accessibility skills. Much of this work is now based on online platforms and collaboration, bringing about a radical transformation of the translation profession, beyond national and geographical frontiers. While new opportunities seem to be endless, translators around the globe find themselves under new and contradictory types of pressure: they must be professional but inexpensive, meticulous but business-minded, specialised but flexible. The same types of pressure are exerted on translation training programmes, committed to preparing students for the international professional market. How does this new reality affect their principles, aims and methods? This presentation will discuss questions of competence and specialisation in translation curricula and some of the competitive advantages of online translation courses. 

Iwona MAZUR
Training for audio description: local requirements vs local attitudes

Training for Audio Description (AD) is far from uniform across Europe. It seems to be a mirror reflection of the AD market in the respective countries: in the more AD-advanced countries (such as the UK or Germany) AD training opportunities are greater, with training courses being offered at universities (often as part of AVT courses), by AD practitioners or industry organisations. On the other hand, in the less AD-developed countries (such as Poland) such courses are practically non-existent or are very slowly coming into being.
The situation on the global arena as regards Audio Description is changing, with the voice of associations for the visually impaired being more and more audible, and the need to make the visual media accessible to people with visual impairments being increasingly recognised by national governments, the European Union and the public at large.
These changing global attitudes will surely impact the local requirements in individual countries, resulting in unprecedented demand for audio described materials and, by the same token, for well-qualified audio describers. This directly translates into a pressing need to set up AD training courses in the respective countries to meet the demand.
Are the countries prepared to meet this challenge? Where should AD be taught? Who should teach it? Should a uniform European AD curriculum be developed, in view of the possible standardisation of European AD guidelines? If so, who should be in charge of such curriculum development and how should it be implemented? Will it be possible to account for all the different AD conventions and existing audience preferences in such a curriculum? Although it is highly probable that no definite answers are to be found to these questions, I trust that the roundtable discussion will shed new light on these and other issues relevant for training future audio describers.

Josélia NEVES
Training SDH professionals in/for the digital age

In a time when the audiovisual landscape is taking new directions, one might ask whether the old premises for subtitler training still hold. Despite that fact that technology is allowing for greater manipulation and freedom, and thus requiring a number of new (technical) skills, the basic skills required by those providing SDH remain very much the same. 
In short, if subtitlers working on SDH want to produce a truly useful accessibility service they will always need to have a profound knowledge of the profile and the needs of their specific addressees and audiences (the d/Deaf and the hard-of-hearing); a good knowledge of filmic composition, particularly in respect to the place and meaning of sound (in all its forms) in the compositional whole; a clear understanding of redundancy, relevance, adequacy, cohesion and coherence, so as to guarantee truly meaningful reading material; and the ability to draw both upon sense and sensibility when difficult choices need to be made. In this presentation we will look into a few practical exercises which might be carried out to develop such basic skills.

Pilar ORERO et al.
Promoting self-learning in the EHEA:
A new multimedia mining workstation for AVT

Training in audiovisual translation (AVT) is gaining momentum with multiple courses in the European arena. However, the process of adaptation to the new European Higher Education Area (EHEA) derived from the Bologna Process requires a series of reforms which  affect methodological issues, among others. In the new scenario students are expected not only to attend regular lectures and tutorials, but also to devote a pre-established amount of time to autonomous learning. Bearing this in mind, a group of researchers at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) have started a project which aims to offer students a new tool which promotes self-learning in the field of AVT.
This new tool is an online workstation which allows students to practice different types of AVT modalities (dubbing, voice-over, subtitling), including those related to media accessibility (audio description, subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing), by means of a data mining system. When students access the online interface, they are asked to define a series of parameters such as: language combination, AVT modality, difficulty (humour, register, dialects, cultural elements, songs, etc.), level, and material available (script/no script). Based on these criteria, the tool retrieves a selection of clips from which students can select one to work on autonomously. Once finished, the system allows students to check the broadcast version of the clip and a file containing additional proposals and some pedagogical feedback.
Apart from promoting self-learning, this tool also benefits lecturers in organising their materials. Clips can be uploaded in the system, can be easily retrieved and can be made visible or non-visible to students.

The project, which started in July 2008 and will last until July 2010, is financed by the Catalan Government (2008MQD000014) and is developed by five researchers from two different departments (Translation and Engineering). The results of the first stage of the project (2008-2009) as well as future prospects will be presented at the Antwerp conference.