Supervisor: Professor Lucile Desblache

Institution email: dawsonh@roehampton.ac.uk

This project is an advanced study in the area of media accessibility. It endeavours to complete empirical research that can lead to the implementation of interlingual respeaking. Respeaking, also referred to as live subtitling, is an effective way to make both live and pre-recorded television accessible to a wider audience, especially to the deaf and hard of hearing community (DHOH). Interest is growing in the media industry as broadcasters use respeaking to transfer spoken words into subtitles on screen. Respeakers use speech recognition software to repeat or paraphrase what is heard through a microphone in a robotic voice while enunciating punctuation and adding colours to identify the speakers. Intralingual respeaking, from English into the same language, has been practised since the BBC tested it in April 2001 with the World Snooker Championship (Romero-Fresco: 2011). However, the main objective of this research is to determine whether an effective model can be used to practise interlingual respeaking, from English into a foreign language. Currently, interlingual respeaking is not commonly performed and must be researched, in collaboration with the industry, to provide an original contribution to both academia and industry through a mix of theory and practical experiments. Throughout my research I will conduct various experiments to test the viability of live interlingual subtitles from English into Spanish. This would be pioneering, as the results will be used to explore difficulties that arise when producing live interlingual subtitles through speech recognition. Additionally, it will incorporatea particular emphasis on the profile best suited to interlingual respeaking and question whether the background of a bilingual subtitler or a simultaneous interpreter would be preferred. I aim for the research to be used in the following ways: to prove whether live interlingual respeaking is feasible; to implement sturdy theory and techniques on how professionals could work in the UK and Europe; to create a model for training for interlingual respeaking; and to ensure that the DHOH community and a foreign audience can fully enjoy audiovisual texts with ease.