By Hannah and Tiina
As we prepare for our Subtitle Chat next week, we’ve been reflecting on our activities over the past few months. As we wrote in this blog post, Hannah was busy having a baby, and Tiina was starting a new job. However, the SubComm work went on, though in a slightly more behind-the-scenes way.
Publication: Focus Group Study
We published our article based on the focus group study we did with academics and practitioners. We wanted to look at collaboration between researchers and practitioners in AVT, and so we invited representatives of both groups to a focus group where we asked them about their experiences of collaborative research. In the article, we talk about ‘Public Translation Studies’. This is an idea developed by Kaisa Koskinen, where academics would reach out beyond their own disciplines, but also beyond academia, in a dialogue that would mean research could have greater impact. The findings of our study were positive, in the sense that among our small groups of participants, there was an appetite for more collaborative research, and they had plenty of ideas about how to make those collaborations work best. Their experience of collaboration was that, as well as the obvious time and money issues, communication challenges could be a big barrier to success. In the article, we suggest that at the start of a collaborative project, everyone should work together to decide on goals that are important for everyone involved, so that the research benefits everyone. We also noted that this kind of research can be really rewarding, and, if we can make it work, we can support one another as we work to secure the future sustainability of the profession and the discipline.
Publication: User-Centred Subtitling [Tiina]
In June, Tiina published an article she had been working on for quite a while. It’s called “User-Centred Subtitling: Usability as an Assessment and Process Framework for Interlingual Subtitles”, and it was published in the Journal of Audiovisual Translation. The purpose of the article is to explore how the concept of usability could be helpful in assessing subtitles and in designing subtitling processes where the viewers, their needs and preferences are a priority. The article proposes several tools that can be used to assess the usability of subtitles and to incorporate viewers’ perspectives into the subtitling process. Of course, it may not be easy to sell user-centered ideas to some of the big companies that are mostly interested in automation and faster, less expensive processes. However, some of the tools may in fact be close to existing practices, and we can hope there are some operators in the field who have an interest in improving quality and in providing a higher-end service for clients that want to serve their audiences well. And, of course, individual subtitlers might be interested in how to create usable subtitles and assess subtitles from the audience’s perspective. Tiina would love to explore some of these ideas in practice, so she hopes this article might help her find partners who would like to experiment with usability and user-centered tools in real-world situations. Let her know if you might be one of them! She is also open to explaining the UCT subtitling model in more detail, perhaps at a SubComm virtual event in the near future.
SubComm x Subtle
Back in April, SubComm joined forces with Subtle, the UK Subtitlers Association, to co-host an online networking meeting. The event was really well-attended, and we really enjoyed the discussions we had there, which sparked a few ideas for us, and also showed us what practitioners might be looking for. We did a few polls at the event, and found that a lot of the participants were practitioners, while there were also a few students, researchers and practisearchers. We asked them what research themes/topics they thought were important, and they highlighted working conditions, readability and accessibility, among others. We talked about Machine Translation, research projects involving other areas of the industry, and where to find out about AVT research. In all, the event seemed really well-received and SubComm and Subtle plan to keep working together, including on ideas that emerged from the discussions in April. Watch this space!
Subtitle Chat
Our next subtitle chat is on Wednesday, 1st October, and the theme is ‘Share your story’; we hope to learn more about the backgrounds of participants, how they ended up researching or making subtitles, as well as chatting about anything else that comes up. There’s still time to sign up here – do join us!
