Anna Matamala who has BA in Translation (UAB) and PhD in Applied Linguistics (UPF, Barcelona), is since 2009 a senior tenured lecturer at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Certified audiovisual translator for the Catalan Television (1996-present). Former coordinator of the PhD in Translation and Intercultural Studies at UAB (2010-2014), where she led an active internationalization policy, and of the MA in Audiovisual Translation at UAB (2005-2012).

A member of the international research group TransMedia (www.transmediaresearchgroup.com), and of its local branch Transmedia Catalonia (www.grupsderecerca.uab.cat/transmedia), Anna Matamala has participated and led many funded projects on audiovisual translation and media accessibility.

She has taken an active role in the organisation of scientific events such as the Media for All conference or the Advanced Research Audio Description Seminar ARSAD, and has published extensively in international refereed journals such as Meta, The Translator, Perspectives, Babel, Translation Studies, among others.

She is the author of a book on interjections and lexicography (IEC, 2005), co-author (with Eliana Franco and Pilar Orero) of a book on voice-over (Peter Lang, 2010), and co-editor of four volumes on audiovisual translation and media accessibility. Joan Coromines Prize in 2005, and APOSTA Award to Young Researchers in 2011.

Her research interests are audiovisual translation, media accessibility and applied linguistics. She is currently involved in standardisation work at ISO.

Anna Matamala

will present the poster…

The Reception of Intralingual and Interlingual Automatic Subtitling: An Exploratory Study within The HBB4ALL Project

 

Abstract

The Hybrid Broadcast Television for All (HBB4ALL) project is a European Commission co-financed project within the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP-ICT-PSP-2013-5.1.). The project builds on HbbTV, the European standard for broadcast and broadband multimedia converged services, and looks at how HbbTV technologies may be used to enhance access services such as subtitling, audio description or sign language on both the production and service sides.

]The main objective of the HBB4ALL project is to test access services in various pilot implementations (from the definition to the operational phase) and gather implicit and explicit user feedback to assess the acceptance and the achievable quality of service in the various delivery scenarios. Specifically, pilot A researches a “Multi-platform subtitle workflow chain” and aims to advance HbbTV automatic multilingual subtitling functionalities. The pilot is built up on technology developed within other existing European projects, including technology for automatic subtitling generation and translation. This paper presents the results of the experiments carried out by testers within this specific pilot.

The experiments aimed to determine if either intralingual or interlingual automatic subtitling help to better understand news content. Experiments departed from the hypothesis that intralingual automatic subtitling would increase comprehension –as compared to a standard viewing with no subtitles– but interlingual subtitling would not. The materials used were three two-minute English clips from the Reuters news service. The contents were automatically subtitled in English and automatically translated to Spanish. A post-edition process to correct mistakes was not included.

In the first experiment, 56 Political Science students were divided into two groups (lower level/higher level of English). This preliminary testing allowed us: (a) to compare the comprehension of English clips automatically subtitled in English (intralingual subtitling) and Spanish (interlingual) on students with  low level of English, (b) to compare the comprehension reached by students with low level of English using subtitles to that of students with higher level of English without using subtitles, and most importantly, (c) to test the methodology, especially in terms of the best tools to be used when testing comprehension of audiovisual materials.

In the second experiment (main experiment), data from the exposure of 30 volunteers to the three conditions (no subtitles/intralingual/interlingual) were gathered and analysed. Comprehension was measured qualitatively through a summarisation task and quantitatively through a multiple-choice questionnaire, focusing on the key aspects of any breaking news story (who?, what?, when?, where?, how?, why?) and controlling for the information provided visually. An English proficiency control test as well as a demographics questionnaire were administered to the participants previous to the experiment.

The paper presents the rationale behind the experiments, the experimental design and the results. It also discusses methodological aspects such as the best tools to measure comprehension in audiovisual subtitled content.[/bg_collapse

 

 
Co-authors
Andreu Oliver, PhD student in Cognitive Psychology in UAB, holds a scholarship from the HBB4ALL European project to help develop and carry out part of the tests about the accessibility services of HbbTv. Member of Transmedia Catalonia and of Perception, Language and Time Group Aitor Álvarez works as staff Researcher of the Human Speech and Language Technologies group at VICOMTECH. He studied Computer Science at the University of the Basque Country (2005). He carried out his final year project at the Department of Architecture and Computer Technology of the same university, where he continued working as a scholar. He is currently a PhD student, has completed the Diploma of Advanced Studies and is working on his thesis on advanced audio and speech processing techniques for the media. In July 2007 he joined VICOMTECH, where he has been working as project manager and researcher involved in speech related R&D projects. He has been involved in several European projects and has published several papers in relevant international and national conferences. Andoni Aizpietia is part of the Human Speech and Language Technologies (HSLT) group at VICOMTECH-IK4, a group he joined in early 2013. He holds an Engineering degree in Computer Science, obtained at the University of the Basque Country (UPV) in 2010. He then graduated with a Masters in Language Analysis and Processing (LAP), a degree offered by the IXA group at the UPV (2014). He has participated in several European, National and Regional research projects, notably the Opener and Sumat FP7 projects, on several NLP topics, including core NLP technologies, sentiment analysis, automated quality estimation and statistical machine translation. He is currently a member of the Machine Translation group within the HSLT department, involved in its core research and development activities.