[CFP] 7th International Symposium on Live Subtitling and Accessibility

Call for Papers

Since investigation on live subtitling started, this field of study has always been characterised by an evolving scenario, with contributions from many fields: IT, Translation Studies, Interpreting Studies, Media Accessibility, Cognitive Science, not to forget didactics.

This has allowed live subtitling to increasingly become the object of conferences, academic and vocational courses, research studies, scientific publications, international projects, associations, new technological and professional advances have been contributing to the rapid dissemination of live subtitling.

Though all this started with an interest in respeaking as a revolutionary technique, studies on live subtitling have been able to recently include other techniques, especially thanks to the interest of the professional community who has understood the importance of working in synergy with academia. And vice versa!

This has not only improved what already existed and proved to be well performing, but also widened the number of languages, audiences, and applications, with automation powerfully coming to the fore. As a consequence the attention of all stakeholders has moved to quality and to the different and alternative types of  exploiting the potential of both the product and the process of live subtitling, such as automatic and semi-automatic live subtitles, live editing, and interlingual subtitling, among others.

After Forlì (2006), Barcelona (2009), Antwerp (2011), Barcelona (2013), Rome (2015), and Milan (2018), the 7th International Symposium on Live Subtitling will be organised in Munich on November 6th and 7th, 2020, by the joint collaboration of the International federation for Information and Communication processing and the local Sprachen und Dolmetscher Institut of the University of Applied Languages.

The symposium is traditionally an important think-tank with professionals, users, and researchers usefully exchanging their views about the most diverse fields of interest. For this reason, the scientific committee welcomes members of the professional and academic world to send proposals about the following topics, but not limited to them:

• quality of real-time subtitles;
• comparison of different live subtitling techniques;
• automatic and semi-automatic live subtitling;
• interlingual live subtitling;
• live and multimedia reporting;
• the didactics of live subtitling;
• new technological developments;
• live editing.

Abstracts in English of max. 1000 characters should be sent to conference@sdi-muenchen.de by March 15th, as an attachment clearly mentioning author, affiliation, and proposed title of speech.

Notification of accepted proposals will be communicated to authors directly by March 22nd and the final program published by 31st March 2020.

The presentation time for individual papers is 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for discussion. The working language of the conference is English.

Key Dates

• 15 March 2020: Deadline for presentation proposals
• 22 March 2020: Notification of acceptance

Programme

Thursday, 5th November 2020
Preceding workshops

Friday, 6th November 2020
Conference

Workshop 1:
Write faster, even in real-time.

In this workshop you will learn basic concepts of deafness and real-time subtitling, and how to use your voice or the Velotype keyboard to create real-time intralingual subtitles.

Trainers: Carlo Eugeni, Wim Gerbecks, Marcel Bobeldijk.

Workshop 2:
Accessibility for speakers – getting everyone involved in the respeaking process

High quality respeaking at live events doesn’t just come down to the respeaker. Everyone present can facilitate the access process and contribute to the quality of the respeaking produced, whether it is a conference presentation, talk or tour. In this workshop, you will learn straightforward techniques that speakers can follow to improve their presentations, slides and delivery, while supporting real-time subtitlers in the provision of the service. We will also explore how the other people present, including the venue staff, organisers and audience, can support this process.

Trainers: Zoe Moores

A detailed program will be published on 31st March 2020.