Feasibility, Quality and Assessment of Interlingual Live Subtitling

Abstract

Intralingual respeaking has been widely practiced since 2001 (Romero-Fresco, 2011), however, interlingual respeaking (from one language into another) is yet to take off. As a hybrid form of subtitling and interpreting, interlingual respeaking calls upon skills used in both professions. To transform this mode of audiovisual translation (AVT) within Media Accessibility (MA), a programme must be created to train future interlingual live subtitlers (ILSers). This paper presents the results of the first ever study on interlingual live subtitling (ILS), in which 10 participants interlingually respoke three short videos using a language combination of English and Spanish. The main areas of research in this project are feasibility, quality and training. Before expanding training in this area, ILS must be deemed feasible and an effective method of assessment must be in place to determine its quality. The average accuracy rate of the study is 97.17%, with the highest accuracy rate reaching the 98% threshold with 98.33%. The initial results point to ILS as feasible providing a training programme is put in place to build upon existing task-specific skills and develop new ones to ensure interlingual live subtitles of good quality are produced.

A Research-Informed Training Course for Interlingual Respeaking

“…For the pilot experiment (Dawson, 2019), 8 participants with backgrounds in subtitling, interpreting and intralingual respeaking received one hour of respeaking training and dictation practice before carrying out interlingual respeaking exercises with 2-minute video clips: a narration (102 words per minute, wpm) and a speech (101 wpm). Participants obtained an average accuracy rate of 97.35% (3.5/10), which at first glance may make interlingual respeaking seem more than feasible; however, the video clips used had slow speech rates and short durations with no specialised or challenging terminology.…”

“…The research has also informed Intellectual Output 2 (IO2) of the ILSA project. Results of a small-scale pilot study (Dawson, 2019) and a large-scale study (Dawson & Romero-Fresco, forthcoming in 2020) informed the creation of an interlingual respeaking module for the first known online interlingual respeaking course delivered by the University of Vigo. All interlingual respeaking exercises were carried out from English into Spanish.…”

“…For interlingual live subtitling, the ILSA (Interlingual Live Subtitling for Access) project has led the way for recent research, which aims to identify the skills and the profile of the interlingual live subtitler, develop the first training course on interlingual respeaking, and provide a protocol for its implementation in various settings. Prior to ILSA, experimental studies had only tested interlingual respeaking on a small-scale (Davitti, Sandrelli, & Romero-Fresco, 2018;Dawson, 2019). As a result of ILSA, survey-based research has explored the profile of the interlingual live subtitler (Robert, Schrijver, & Diels, 2019a) and perceptions of training (Robert, Schrijver, & Diels, 2019b), theory-based research has explored the required competences (Pöchhacker & Remael, 2019), and experimental research has tested interlingual respeaking performance (Dawson, 2019;Dawson & Romero-Fresco, forthcoming in 2020).…”

“…Prior to ILSA, experimental studies had only tested interlingual respeaking on a small-scale (Davitti, Sandrelli, & Romero-Fresco, 2018;Dawson, 2019). As a result of ILSA, survey-based research has explored the profile of the interlingual live subtitler (Robert, Schrijver, & Diels, 2019a) and perceptions of training (Robert, Schrijver, & Diels, 2019b), theory-based research has explored the required competences (Pöchhacker & Remael, 2019), and experimental research has tested interlingual respeaking performance (Dawson, 2019;Dawson & Romero-Fresco, forthcoming in 2020).…”

Embracing the Complexity

“…These results were interpreted as evidence of a successful transfer of skills from interpreting to respeaking; however, given the small sample size, further validation is needed. Dawson (2019) reports the results of a pilot experiment carried out in preparation for a larger experiment within the ILSA (Interlingual Live Subtitling for Access) project. 6 The pilot involved 10 participants who performed IRSP (English into Spanish) of three short videos (just over two minutes).…”