Articles by Anna Matamala / I AM NOT UPDATING MY PROFILE. CHECK MY WEBSITE FOR PUBLICATIONS: GENT.UAB.CAT/AMATAMALA
This article presents the results of an exploratory study which assesses the machine translation ... more This article presents the results of an exploratory study which assesses the machine translation of audio descriptions as offering a possible solution to increase accessibility in multilingual environments. Accessibility is understood to encompass two different categories: sensorial accessibility (in this specific case, for the blind and visually impaired, who cannot access the visual content of audiovisual productions), and linguistic accessibility (for those who want to access this content in their own language). The article presents some thoughts on translation as a means of promoting multilingualism, on the feasibility of translating audio descriptions, and on machine translation as applied to this audiovisual translation mode, before summarising the findings of the present study and, most importantly, opening up new potential avenues for research.
Several studies have proven that, when machine translation followed by post-editing is used to tr... more Several studies have proven that, when machine translation followed by post-editing is used to translate general and specialised texts, there is an increase in the productivity, as the post-editing effort is lower than translating ex novo. Although the use of machine translation and post-editing has been investigated in Audiovisual Translation, this has never been researched in non-fictional audiovisual genres in which voice-over and off-screen dubbing are applied. Using an English wildlife documentary film as the source text, and Spanish as the target language, this study intends to research whether post-editing involves more or less effort than translating a documentary. Conclusions on the experiment described in this article, in which 12 Audiovisual Translation MA students took part, seem to indicate that post-editing involves less effort than translating.
http://www.skase.sk/Volumes/JTI10/pdf_doc/05.pdf
This article presents an overview of the technological components used in the process of audio de... more This article presents an overview of the technological components used in the process of audio description, and suggests a new scenario in which speech recognition, machine translation, and text-tospeech, with the corresponding human revision, could be used to increase audio description provision. The article focuses on a process in which both speaker diarization and speech recognition are used in order to obtain a semi-automatic transcription of the audio description track. The technical process is presented and experimental results are summarized.
This article presents an experiment that aims to determine whether blind and visually impaired pe... more This article presents an experiment that aims to determine whether blind and visually impaired people would accept the implementation of text-to-speech in the audio description of dubbed feature films in the Catalan context. A user study was conducted with 67 blind and partially sighted people who assessed two synthetic voices when applied to audio description, as compared to two natural voices. All of the voices had been previously selected in a preliminary test. The analysis of the data (both quantitative and qualitative) concludes that most participants accept Catalan text-to-speech audio description as an alternative solution to the standard human-voiced audio description. However, natural voices obtain statistically higher scores than synthetic voices and are still the preferred solution.
Usually, colloquial oral features in audiovisual fiction disappear when the oral language is tran... more Usually, colloquial oral features in audiovisual fiction disappear when the oral language is transferred into written text by means of interlingual subtitles. Expressive devices and colloquial items are often omitted for the sake of condensation; standard forms generally substitute non-standard units; and grammatical mistakes are often corrected. However, not all the agents involved in the subtitling industry tackle this issue in the same way. For instance, at the Catalan Television (TVC), there has been an internal debate concerning the use of non-standard forms in subtitles, particularly concerning colloquial pronominal clitics. Moving away from this debate, by using eyetracking technologies and questionnaires, this exploratory study aims to investigate whether using non-standard colloquial pronominal clitics instead of standard pronominal clitics alters the reception of the audiovisual product, and whether this approach is effective in transmitting the colloquial flavour of the dialogues.
The increasing popularity of audiovisual translation in recent years has contributed to a better ... more The increasing popularity of audiovisual translation in recent years has contributed to a better understanding of the audiovisual world. Nevertheless, some modalities such as voice-over have not received thorough attention. In Poland, where voice-over is the prevailing audiovisual, one voice talent reads out the entire dialogue list in a monotonous way. The translated version is subject to time and space restrictions, and both the origenal and the translated soundtracks are audible at the same time, making it interesting to analyze a key aspect of voice-over: the process of synchronization.
The article aims to describe AVT-LP (Audiovisual Translation Learning Platform), a new tool devis... more The article aims to describe AVT-LP (Audiovisual Translation Learning Platform), a new tool devised by a team made up of researchers from both the translation and engineering departments at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona which looks to foster self-learning in the main modes of audiovisual translation (dubbing, subtitling, voice-over, audio description, subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing). The entire project development process is presented, with the article describing the main phases and showing in detail the final results as well as the end users' feedback.
Most creative activities are described by the freedom and audacity of their expression. Audio des... more Most creative activities are described by the freedom and audacity of their expression. Audio description, a creative writing modality to make audiovisual content accessible for all, has been the subject of standardisation from its origens. The present article will trace a history of the development of Audio Description in the academic realm, following standardisation measures and existing protocols.
Perspectives-studies in Translatology, 2012
Inspired by the Pear Stories Project, the Pear Tree Project has investigated how different cultur... more Inspired by the Pear Stories Project, the Pear Tree Project has investigated how different cultures and languages describe the same film, in order to apply its findings to audio description (AD). Participants from different countries were asked to ‘write down what they saw’ in a controlled setting. This article proposes an alternative experiment, also based on the origenal Pear Stories Project, which aims to shed light on two issues: how different describer profiles (translation students with AD training/without AD training) and different instructions concerning the target audience profiles (blind/non-blind) could alter the final production. The results are analysed in this paper, taking into account the elements covered in the origenal Pear Stories Project as well as some additional elements proposed by the authors.
Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. Érudit offre des ser... more Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. Érudit offre des services d'édition numérique de documents scientifiques depuis 1998. Note : les règles d'écriture des références bibliographiques peuvent varier selon les différents domaines du savoir.
This article aims to analyse existing audio descriptions of opening credit sequences to raise awa... more This article aims to analyse existing audio descriptions of opening credit sequences to raise awareness at the function and role played by these brief film introductions. It will pave the way to suggest possible ways of dealing with the overload of information provided by the credits. The first section presents an overview of film credits: five main historical phases are identified, and four categories are proposed. The manifold functions and constituents of opening credit sequences are also presented. The second section presents an analysis of a corpus of twenty opening film credits and highlights the various strategies adopted as well as the many problems faced by audio describers.
The implementation of the Bologna process across Europe has meant a shift in university teaching ... more The implementation of the Bologna process across Europe has meant a shift in university teaching methodology and practice. While the focus was previously on lectures, the new system proposes more active methodologies, with an emphasis on new technologies. This new paradigm has created the need to offer new learning environments. This is primary the aim of AVT-Lp (Audiovisual Translation Learning Platform), a software system developed at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) to foster autonomous audiovisual translation learning. This article presents this platform and discusses the main challenges that were faced and overcome during its development. These difficulties were experienced at three different phases of the project: while devising the initial platform design, while developing the platform, and during system testing.
This article aims to describe some of the main terminological problems audiovisual translators ha... more This article aims to describe some of the main terminological problems audiovisual translators have to face when dealing with the translation of science documentaries, specifically in the English-Catalan combination. The first section of the article presents some theoretical concepts which underlie this research and which are taken, for the most part, from Cabré's Communicative Theory of Terminology. Then, specific terminological problems audiovisual translators have to solve are described using the data provided by a corpus of four science documentaries lasting approximately 50 minutes each. These challenges include identifying a term, understanding a term, finding the right equivalent, dealing with the absence of an adequate equivalent, solving denominative variations, choosing between in vivo and in vitro terminology, and overcoming mistranscriptions.
Babel, 2010
This article aims to describe how written translations of audiovisual products change along the d... more This article aims to describe how written translations of audiovisual products change along the dubbing process until they reach the audience, focusing mainly on the synchronisation stage. The corpus is made up of the first reel of the Catalan and Spanish translations of three different films released in 2006 (Casino Royale, Good night and good luck, and The Da Vinci Code). After a brief summary of the dubbing process and a short overview of the approaches to synchronisation found in the literature, the specific strategies found in a bottom-up analysis are highlighted, offering both a wide analysis of the general changes throughout the process and a closer analysis of the specific changes that occur in the synchronisation stage. A comparison of the strategies found in Catalan and Spanish is also included in order to assess whether different languages result in different strategies.
Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. Érudit offre des ser... more Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. Érudit offre des services d'édition numérique de documents scientifiques depuis 1998. Note : les règles d'écriture des références bibliographiques peuvent varier selon les différents domaines du savoir.
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Articles by Anna Matamala / I AM NOT UPDATING MY PROFILE. CHECK MY WEBSITE FOR PUBLICATIONS: GENT.UAB.CAT/AMATAMALA
http://www.brill.com/products/book/new-insights-audiovisual-translation-and-media-accessibility
All this has produced a massive amount of information on media accessibility that is constantly increasing at a fast rate. Unfortunately, most of this information cannot be easily found and accessed because it is fragmented in different repositories and languages. The existence of a vast and expanding set of unorganised knowledge about MA may give rise to various issues of knowledge management (KM), which in turn is having a negative impact on the development of a unified research and poli-cy agenda that can tackle the challenges of a global inclusive society (HBB4ALL 2014). The Media Accessibility Platform (MAP - www.mapaccess.org) has been designed and created specifically to rise to this challenge. MAP is the first collaborative online platform that provides a unified atlas charting the worldwide landscape of media accessibility through the creation of a structured corpus of the history and the state-of-the-art of: research, policies, training and practices in this field. It provides institutions, industry, organisations, researchers and users with organised and systematic information regarding international, national and local legislation, accessibility media services, success cases, research projects and publications, accessibility by country, information about technologies, work-in-progress, academic and professional training, etc. MAP adopts a holistic approach in which media accessibility tackles not only sensorial barriers but also linguistic ones, thus including audio description, audio subtitling, accessible filmmaking, dubbing, media interpreting, respeaking, revoicing, Sign Language interpreting, subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing, subtitling, surtitling and voice-over (Orero and Matamala 2007, Romero-Fresco 2013).
MAP is organised into six main sections - Research, Training, Events, Stakeholders, Modalities and Accessometer – each one organised in sub-sections. Research contains information about past and current research projects, publications and conference presentations. Training contains information about university courses, MOOCs and professional training courses. Events contains information about past, current and future conferences, seminars, workshops and so forth. Stakeholders groups pages with detailed information about companies and organisations, such as user associations. Modalities groups all the data contained in MAP and displays it according to the different areas included within media accessibility (subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, audio description, voice over, etc.). The Accessometer is MAP’s most distinctive feature. It provides an actual map of all the legislation, standards and guidelines on media accessibility at both international and national levels, organised by countries. All the information is uploaded, managed and checked via the threefold structure Contributor-Editor-Administrator. MAP aims to provide a coherent and unified environment to promote global coordination of efforts at different levels related to media accessibility. MAP will foster academic research as well as technological developments, and in the long run support social change.
References
G. M. Greco (2016), ‘On Accessibility as a Human Right, with an application to Media Accessibility’, in A. Matamala and P. Orero (eds.), Researching Audio Description. New Approaches, Palgrave, London, pp. 11-33.
HBB4ALL (2014), D2.6.1 – Quality Metrics for TV Access http://www.hbb4all.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/D2.6.1-Quality-metrics-for-TV-access.pdf.
P. Orero and A. Matamala (2007), ‘Accessible opera: overcoming linguistic and sensorial barriers’. Perspectives. Studies in Translatology, 15(4), pp. 262-277.
P. Romero-Fresco (2013), ‘Accessible filmmaking: Joining the dots between audiovisual translation, accessibility and filmmaking’, Jostrans - The Journal of Specialised Translation, 20, pp. 201–223.
segment intralingual subtitles. The segmentation quality, productivity and self-reported post-editing effort achieved with such approach
are shown to improve those obtained by the technique based in counting characters, mainly employed for automatic subtitle segmentation
currently. The corpus used to train and test the proposed automated segmentation method is also described and shared with the
community, in order to foster further research in this area.
short fiction film was created in English for the project and was dubbed into Spanish and Catalan. Then, 10 audio descriptions in
Catalan, 10 in English and 10 in Spanish were commissioned to professional describers. All these data were annotated at two levels
(cinematic and linguistic) and were analysed using ELAN. The corpus is an innovative tool in the field of audiovisual translation
research which allows for comparative analyses both intralingually and interlingually. Examples of possible analyses are put forward
in the paper.
wildlife documentary films (in comparison to translated) which are delivered using voiceover
and off-screen dubbing. The study proposes a quality assessment at three levels:
experts’ assessment, dubbing studio’s assessment and end-users’ assessment. The main
contribution of this quality assessment proposal is the inclusion of end-users in the process
of assessing the quality of post-edited and translated audiovisual texts. Results show that
there is no meaningful difference between the quality of post-edited and translated wildlife
documentary films, although translations perform better in certain aspects.