Background Internet and audiovisual media are transforming our world, but their potential will not be realised until they become fully accessible and enable the participation of all citizens in everyday life. Audiovisual translation and media accessibility have become drivers of social inclusion and have lately received recognition in the literature and in EU-funded projects. In the area of live subtitling, the preferred technique is respeaking, where subtitlers listen to the original soundtrack of a programme or public event and simultaneously repeat/rephrase what they hear to a speech recognition software that turns these words into same-language subtitles, mostly for viewers with hearing loss. Now, a new challenge has emerged, as migration streams and the increased multilingual composition of societies have led to a growing demand for accessibility to live audiovisual content and events conducted in a foreign language. This is even more pressing and relevant in the current pandemic, where live translation and accessibility for online events is a must. It is thus crucial to find trained professionals who can produce interlingual live subtitles and who, until now, have been few far between. ILSA set out to fill this gap by introducing and developing a new discipline, interlingual speech-to-text interpreting through respeaking, which brings together translation, subtitling and simultaneous interpreting. This is a critical moment for media accessibility. Given the growing demand for access to live content in a foreign language, ILS will be produced sooner or later. What is at stake here is the quality of the product. Only through research-informed comprehensive training programmes such as the one proposed by ILSA will it be possible to ensure that this new service meets the required standards regarding the product and the working conditions of the professionals involved. This is an essential step to guarantee a truly wider access that can include and integrate both deaf and foreign audiences in the audiovisual, educational, political and social life of the countries in which they are living. Partners ILSA’s intercultural mission required transnational cooperation and a wide scope including a variety of languages (English, Spanish, Galician, Dutch, German and Polish), language situations (monolingual and bilingual countries) and audiovisual translation traditions (dubbing, subtitling, voice-over). The combination of educational (University of Vigo, University of Vienna, University of Warsaw & University of Antwerp) and non-educational partners (VRT [broadcaster] and INTRO PR [access service provider]) facilitated bottom-up transectorial collaboration for the creation of the new profile and training course as well as for the implementation of ILS in the said contexts. ILSA was also supported by 25 associated partners from five continents, thus ensuring the involvement of virtually every leading stakeholder in the field and the widest possible reach of the ILSA’s impact. Objectives The ILSA project revolved around seven intellectual outputs (IOs) to achieve its main priority: to develop the new professional profile of the interlingual live subtitler (ILSer). This included an assessment of the current live subtitling practice and training (IO1), on which ILSA built; the identification of the subtitling, interpreting and respeaking skills required for the job (IO2, IO3); the development, assessment and validation of a specialised training course and its materials (IO4, IO5, IO6,IO7); and the creation of a protocol/guidelines to transfer the project results to society for the implementation of interlingual live subtitling (ILS) on TV, in the classroom and in live events (IO7). Results The key project results are the reports on how same-language live subtitling is currently trained and implemented around the world and what skills are required for the new profession (ILS), the guidelines for the implementation of ILS and especially the ILSA course. The latter, based on the empirical results obtained in IOs 1 and 2, is the first online ILS course in the world, available for free at https://mooc.campusdomar.es/courses/course-v1:ILSA+001+2019/about. The training materials can be accessed on the project website: ka2-ilsa.webs.uvigo.es/course-and-training-materials/. The University partners in the project have set up their first ILS programmes (with a duration ranging from 2 months to 1 year) based on the ILSA course. Other universities have adapted their training programmes to incorporate ILSA materials or the ILSA course, including the University of Roehampton (UK), Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona and the European University of Valencia (Spain), whereas others such as Macquarie University (Australia) and the University of Helsinki (Finland) have created ILSA-based bespoke training courses. The ILSA course has also been used to train the Canadian staff of Ai-Media, the leading company providing speech-to-text solutions for broadcast, government, education and corporate clients worldwide. Furthermore, the ILSA team produced guidelines to implement ILS on TV, educational contexts and live events. They are available in English, Spanish, German, Dutch and Polish. This highlights the role played by ILSA as a catalyst for social inclusion and for access to audiovisual media, public institutions and education for people with hearing loss and foreign audiences, including migrants and refugees. Impact The results of the ILSA project (and especially the course and the guidelines) have already had significant impact on governments, companies, universities and users worldwide. Some examples include the integration of an ILSA-based quality assessment model into the official Canadian legislation on accessibility, an on-going collaboration on live subtitling with the UK’s governmental regulator Ofcom, a partnership with the companies Ai-Media and TranscriptionStar for the first-ever provision of ILS services (by ILSA trainees) in the US and Australia, the provision of an ILSA-based training course to Netflix in their Los Angeles offices, the creation (with ILSA’s researchers as founding members) of the Global Alliance for Speech-to-Text Captioning and the presentation of ILS in countries where it had not been introduced, such as Qatar, Russia, Turkey, Uruguay or Chile. The map available on the ILSA website (http://ka2-ilsa.webs.uvigo.es) provides a detailed account of the long-term impact of the project in 25 countries worldwide.
Audiovisual translation and media accessibility have become drivers of social inclusion and have lately received recognition in the literature and in EU-funded projects. In the area of live subtitling, the preferred technique is respeaking, where subtitlers listen to the original soundtrack of a programme or public event and simultaneously repeat/rephrase what they hear to a speech recognition software that turns these words into same-language subtitles, mostly for viewers with hearing loss. Now, a new challenge has emerged, as migration streams and the increased multilingual composition of societies have led to a growing demand for accessibility to live audiovisual content and events conducted in a foreign language. This is even more pressing and relevant in the current pandemic, where live translation and accessibility for online events is a must. It is thus crucial to find trained professionals who can produce interlingual live subtitles and who, until now, have been few far between. ILSA set out to fill this gap by introducing and developing a new discipline, interlingual speech-to-text interpreting through respeaking, which brings together translation, subtitling and simultaneous interpreting. The ILSA project revolved around seven intellectual outputs (IOs) to achieve its main priority: to develop the new professional profile of the interlingual live subtitler (ILSer). This included an assessment of the current live subtitling practice and training (IO1), on which ILSA built; the identification of the subtitling, interpreting and respeaking skills required for the job (IO2, IO3); the development, assessment and validation of a specialised training course and its materials (IO4, IO5, IO6,IO7); and the creation of a protocol/guidelines to transfer the project results to society for the implementation of interlingual live subtitling (ILS) on TV, in the classroom and in live events (IO7). ILSA’s intercultural mission required transnational cooperation and a wide scope including a variety of languages (English, Spanish, Galician, Dutch, German and Polish), language situations (monolingual and bilingual countries) and audiovisual translation traditions (dubbing, subtitling, voice-over). The combination of educational (University of Vigo, University of Vienna, University of Warsaw & University of Antwerp) and non-educational partners (VRT [broadcaster] and INTRO PR [access service provider]) facilitated bottom-up transectorial collaboration for the creation of the new profile and training course as well as for the implementation of ILS in the said contexts. The key project results are the reports on how same-language live subtitling is currently trained and implemented around the world and what skills are required for the new profession (ILS), the guidelines for the implementation of ILS and especially the ILSA course. The latter, based on the empirical results obtained in IOs 1 and 2, is the first online ILS course in the world, available for free at https://tinyurl.com/y687vhs7 (email | [email protected] and password | ILSAtester2019). The training materials can be accessed on the project website: ka2-ilsa.webs.uvigo.es/course-and-training-materials/. The University partners in the project have set up their first ILS programmes (with a duration ranging from 2 months to 1 year) based on the ILSA course. Other universities have adapted their training programmes to incorporate ILSA materials or the ILSA course, including the University of Roehampton (UK), Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona and the European University of Valencia (Spain), whereas others such as Macquarie University (Australia) and the University of Helsinki (Finland) have created ILSA-based bespoke training courses. The ILSA course has also been used to train the Canadian staff of Ai-Media, the leading company providing speech-to-text solutions for broadcast, government, education and corporate clients worldwide. The results of the ILSA project (and especially the course and the guidelines) have already had significant impact on governments, companies, universities and users worldwide. Some examples include the integration of an ILSA-based quality assessment model into the official Canadian legislation on accessibility, an on-going collaboration on live subtitling with the UK’s governmental regulator Ofcom, a partnership with the companies Ai-Media and TranscriptionStar for the first-ever provision of ILS services (by ILSA trainees) in the US and Australia, the provision of an ILSA-based training course to Netflix in their LA offices, the creation (with ILSA’s researchers as founding members) of the Global Alliance for Speech-to-Text Captioning and the presentation of ILS in countries where it had not been introduced, such as Qatar, Russia, Turkey, Uruguay or Chile. The map available on the ILSA website provides a detailed account of the long-term impact of the project in 25 countries worldwide (see also subsection 6.1 of this report).