In 2021, Hannah and I edited a special issue of the Journal of Audiovisual Translation, and it was published right before the end of the year. The theme of the special issue, which was inspired by SubComm, is Sharing Knowledge Between Academia and the Industry: Audiovisual Translation and Accessibility Research for Practice. Our aim for the issue was to provide a publication venue in which one of the aims would be to highlight the relevance of the research for practitioners, and to do it in an accessible way. We hoped that such a publication could inspire more dialogue between researchers and practitioners in a way that is interesting and beneficial to everyone involved.
The publication contains seven fascinating articles, three of them on accessibility and four on audiovisual translation, representing a wide range of approaches. All articles are briefly described in our introduction to the special issue here. Each of them is also summarised in two abstracts: one aimed for an academic audience, and the other one for lay readers who might not be familiar with the topic in advance.
Our own article in the special issue discusses SubComm and the survey we conducted to find out what kinds of activities subtitlers in the UK and Ireland would like SubComm to offer. Some preliminary findings from the survey had already been discussed in our first SubComm online event in the spring of 2021, and the article provides a more detailed analysis of what the survey tells us about practitioners’ needs for professional development and community-building. You can read our article here. We conclude the article by presenting some ideas for how to develop SubComm further and to build a genuine community of academics and practitioners. We have already implemented some of those ideas, including holding online events and opening a discussion forum creating opportunities for networking and community-building, and we are working on the rest of them: watch this space! Before we announce any new activities for SubComm, we would be interested to hear your comments. What do you think about the findings from our survey? What kinds of activities, events, and discussion platforms would you like us to offer? How would you like to participate? If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to post them here or in our discussion forum, and we can also continue this discussion on LinkedIn or Twitter.
We would also welcome feedback and discussion on the JAT special issue as a whole. We would especially like to hear what kind of research would be most interesting to practitioners, and what we could do to make research as accessible and useful as possible. We hope that SubComm can provide one platform for continued dialogue on these topics, and we hope that such a dialogue will lead to interesting new ideas and collaborations, and help us produce impactful research.
