Interlingual Live Subtitling for Access (ILSA)

Live subtitles produced by respeaking are mainly intralingual, which means that there is an urgent need to train professionals who can produce interlingual live subtitles (ILS) with this technique, thus providing access to live content not only for deaf people but also for foreign audiences, including migrants and refugees. The aim of ILSA is to design (IO3 and IO4), develop (IO5), test (IO6) and recognise (IO7) the first training course for ILS and to produce a protocol for the implementation of this service in three real-life scenarios: TV, the classroom and the Parliament (IO7). The curriculum and training materials will be flexible so that they can be integrated in different learning environments, not only for HE translation students but also for professionals already working in translation and accessibility. The ILSA consortium includes four HEls (UVigo, UAntwerp, UWarsaw and UVienna) and three non-academic partners (the Galician Parliament, VRT and Dostepni.eu). The team at UVigo, leader of the project, has been working on intralingual respeaking for the past ten years. It is responsible for the only monograph on the subject and a quality assessment model that is used in over 30 countries worldwide. UVigo will work closely with the Galician Parliament to test the use of ILS in a pioneering service that can make the Parliamentary sessions accessible in Galician, thus promoting a regional language that is spoken by almost 3 million people. UAntwerp was the first university in the world to set up a training course in intralingual respeaking. It has also been involved in many research projects with the public Belgian broadcaster VRT, one of the few broadcasters to have tested ILS. UAntwerp and VRT will collaborate in ILSA to develop and test the new training programme and its implementation for the provision of ILS on TV. The team at UWarsaw has been involved in pioneering experimental research on intra and interlingual respeaking and will be working closely with Dostepni.eu, the first company to produce intra lingual live subtitles for TV and social events in Poland. They will test the training and provision of ILS in conferences and in the classroom as a means of access to education for deaf and foreign people. UVienna, one of the world-leading research and training institutions in interpreting, will provide the necessary expertise regarding the simultaneous interpreting skills required for the new profile. ILSA is 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. The dissemination of the results will also be facilitated by three key actions: the production of a short film illustrating the ILSA training programme, the collaboration with the accessibility focused radio station Fred Film Radio (which will reach 6.7 million people a year through 25 European language channels) and the inclusion of ILSA in the EU-funded MAP, the first on line platform on media accessibility that will reach the key stakeholders worldwide. 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 a research-informed comprehensive training programme such as the one proposed here 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