Having been consolidated as the preferred method to provide live subtitles on TV, respeaking is now facing a number of challenges as European broadcasters are confronted with new legislation and subtitling quotas as well as with critical cuts in their budgets. These challenges will shape the future of the relatively young translation mode and its aim to make audiovisual media accessible for viewers with hearing loss. In countries where respeaking has been used for over a decade and where the quantity of live subtitling is no longer a problem, the issue of quality is now increasingly important, as is the application of respeaking to other contexts such as public events and classrooms. In those countries where respeaking is not yet being used or not used consistently, the further development of speech recognition technology plays a fundamental role. Generally speaking, technological progress is bound to have a significant impact on the nature of respeaking in all contexts, not least with the potential introduction of speaker-independent speech recognition and automatic subtitling.
In short, research in this area is more pertinent than ever. We therefore welcome contributions on the following topics as well as related issues:
- Accuracy and delay in respeaking
- Respeaking in different contexts
- Respeaker training
- Software development and training
- Speaker-independent speech recognition and automatic subtitling
- Reception research
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Please go to http://www.respeaking.net/ or to http://jornades.uab.cat/respeaking/content/4th-international-symposium-live-subtitling-0 to find more information.
