SubComm: Building a Community of Subtitling Scholars and Practitioners
SubComm is an initiative launched in 2021 by Dr Hannah Silvester and Dr Tiina Tuominen to bring together professional subtitlers and academics with an interest in subtitling. The purpose of the initiative is to provide a forum where we can network, share information and work together to address problems and challenges in the field. We hope that SubComm will become a community that will foster closer contacts between subtitlers and academics and lead to interesting collaborations and learning opportunities for everyone. We intend to organize regular events for networking, professional development and research dissemination. We will use this website to share information about SubComm activities, research, and other topics relevant to subtitling. In addition, there is a discussion forum where all those interested in SubComm can interact with each other and with us.
Dr Hannah Silvester
Hannah is a lecturer in French, specialising in Audiovisual Translation at University College Cork, Ireland. She is coordinator of the MA in French Translation at UCC, and teaches translation studies theory and practice at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Hannah holds a PhD in Translation Studies (subtitling) from the University of Glasgow, and an MA in Screen Translation from the University of Sheffield. In her PhD thesis, Hannah researched the subtitling of linguistic variation from French into English. As part of the project, she surveyed professional subtitlers in order to have a deeper understanding of the process. This interaction with professionals, and the insight it brought to her work, led her to develop an interest in collaborating further with practitioners in her research.
Dr Tiina Tuominen
Tiina is currently working as acting professor of English Translation and Interpreting at the University of Turku, Finland. Before Turku, she worked for the Finnish public broadcaster Yle in the EU-funded MeMAD research project studying viewer reactions to machine-translated subtitles. She has also worked as a lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Glasgow and in various roles at the University of Tampere, Finland. She received her PhD in Translation Studies (English) at the University of Tampere. Her PhD thesis was a reception study on subtitled films. Before her academic career, she worked as a freelance subtitler from English into Finnish for several years.
In addition to audience reception, Tiina’s research interests include user-centered translation, multimodality in translation, and translators’ workplace studies. She is currently working on an oral history project where she has interviewed Finnish subtitlers about their work and careers. She is also working on a subtitling-specific application of the user-centered translation model, and on a few other projects related to audiovisual translation. She was inspired to launch SubComm with Hannah because her research on subtitlers’ work and working conditions and her own experiences as a subtitler have shown her how important it is to bring researchers and practitioners together.
Amy Sexton
Amy is an MA student and is currently in the second year of a degree in Translation Studies at University College Cork. She works between German and English and Spanish and English. She has a BA International from University College Cork, graduating in 2021 in European Studies with German and Spanish. She has studied audio-visual translation, and recently completed a university assignment of interest to her which looked at the application of eco-centric translation theory on the subtitling of a German nature documentary into English.
Amy heard about SubComm through Hannah’s audio-visual translation classes, and is particularly interested in the positive outcomes of collaboration between researchers and practitioners following her participation in the Translating Europe Forum in November 2022. She was part of a team of translators who translated Uruguayan playwright Sergio Blanco’s Cartografía de una Desaparición into English in 2021 in University College Cork. She has studied in both Germany and Spain, in the University of Bonn and the University of Salamanca respectively.
