So welcome again to this last session
where we have the honor and the pleasure
of having
the best here today thus to close this conference.
His he doesn't need a lot of introduction,
but I'm going to read his bio anyway.
Professor of Translation and founding director of the Center
of Translation Studies Centers at University College London.
He's the author of numerous, numerous articles and social issues and books.
Individual translation, including subtitling
concepts and Practices with Aileen Rummel, 2021.
A pioneer in audio visual translation culture, has trained translators
to be across six continents, is a frequent speaker
at international conferences and events, and has offered consultant
and has offered consultancy services to the European Parliament.
The European Commission, Natur Una and Netflix, among others.
He is the chief editor of the Peter Lang series New Trends in Translation
Studies and the recipient of the Jennifer Sun Award in 2014
from essayist and Zena Martinez
Award from a in 2015
for invaluable services to the field of ideas or translation.
What's
who is Horsham for me?
I met him when I didn't know who I was
or what the translation was.
It is just summer.
I was a bit bored
and I needed to do something different and I loved cinema,
so I saw a course on subtitling and I was like,
okay, this is like cinema kind of, It must be funny.
And the teacher there for me was this, the teacher
was, How could I think this?
And at the end of the course he mentioned something about the
pedagogical use of subtitling.
And I was starting my Ph.D..
Not, not my dear, I am lying.
I'm doing I was doing some doctorate courses
because I wasn't even thinking about becoming a university,
working at the university.
But that linked with a lot of things in my mind, in my
you know, he's she's, he's the guilty one for everything.
Yeah. And that's where it all started.
And he was he's such a wonderful person, as you all know,
that so accessible that I was in touch with him from minute one
because I wrote to him, he answered about that.
I, I ended up well he ended up co supervising my, my, my piece.
Well that's a long time.
So yeah.
No, I'm running out of words.
Your turn.
Thank you very much, Nora.
It's been a lovely journey together,
and it's a pleasure to be here today with all of you.
As you know, by all the introductions, you must now
guess my age are old enough to have done all those things.
And he's very, very challenging because I've done lots and
lots of things and I've been thinking back
and I think one of my first not my first paper was along these lines
of on teaching Spanish and subtitling and so on,
but I don't think of that much more than that.
Afterwards, I sort of went in two different directions.
I felt a little bit
not tense,
but a bit nervous to come and close this conference here.
And I always joke with people that, you know, if I don't have much to do,
I'm going to end up doing flamenco and please, you will be old
thinking of something else.
And that was it. And I was just sending her an email.
The other is, well, I've never been so close to flamenco.
As for this one, so just there.
So let's hope that is going to be okay.
What I have to tell to you that I know most of you will be much more
of an expert in the matter that I am myself these days.
And I do know that subtitling has got the power to land.
And I just received
when I published my last book to Love Pictures from People.
One is from Peru.
If this is going to work, we tried it, but it's always this obvious.
Okay, well, the one that is one from
Peru are learning on my book.
And then there's one from East Asia.
The little tat I'd like you to think which one is from where
One seems to be much more relaxed about the whole thing in there.
But yes, we we know that subtitling goes
well beyond probably humankind to inspire lots of people here.
Let me just give you a little bit of history.
With the benefit of age
and all the things that I've seen throughout
all these years in in these fascinating, filled
translation in the foreign language classroom or in the second language
classroom, is always had this sort of negative, pained.
Oh, when I was a teacher of a Spanish in London,
you wouldn't use translation.
That was really not the communicative approach.
As long as my students, when I was able to order those etc. business
that was completed, I was successful and they could come to Spain.
And on this practice they communicative approach
in the language.
And whenever we went into grammar, my first shock and horror
was really that, you know what a name is, what a substantive got.
Bless me when I go to the conjunctions under prepositions,
and this is not part of the vocabulary that they had.
So it was very get in one direction.
And going away from that sort of way of that manner of teaching
was not really appropriate.
There were people at the time
from Oxford University, for instance, islanders saying, quoting
these idea that has been replicated
in many of the places that translation has been generally out of labor,
out of favor with the language teaching community,
community almost, we might say, sent to Siberia.
And that was the feeling that we had
Now for me,
who had been at the European Parliament working as a translator.
But I know that going to university in London
and I couldn't use translation and that wasn't really me.
So what I did is I incorporated translation
into my teaching as part of my courses
and at the beginning it was all very literary.
You have to do literary texts.
And I will tell you of a university of whose name I want.
I don't want to remember
one of the exams that was I came across as soon as I started.
This was going to be solo.
I saw enough of Cortazar
a little, but enough, of course, that that translate into English.
No dictionaries.
I just about an hour and a half.
So I was this sort of background for me.
Come in. I said Oh no. Yes, dictionaries.
They can use dictionaries.
Actually, we're going to use videos. Yeah.
And that was really pretty
adorable at the time.
You know, it was
everybody else was doing something completely different in that area
and it was this philological very grammar
driven approach to translation.
I don't know if you read these reports from the European Union.
It was a few years back by scholars from Translation
and just taking a look at what was the place of language
translation in the language classroom and that it started
bringing back again
this idea of translation as a rather positive activity
that we could carry out in the classroom.
What is then the position or how did we start
in aid in the foreign language classroom?
And I heard somebody just before me
saying, Oh, yes, whenever I go to a conference, I always I'm
always given the last spot or just when nobody wants to come and things.
Well, that's what it was.
Me, I was never refused a paper at a conference because it was the odd
one out, you know, in translation.
Nobody was doing subtitling or anything like that at the beginning.
So they were just occupying gum.
It was either it was even what it was early in the morning
in that day that you just wanted to go out the previous night.
So that was a little bit about.
And here we were, late comers for everyone.
We were late comers for translation.
Everybody was doing all the translation things
and the school systems were already running and very successful,
but nobody was doing really audiovisual translation apart
from a little bit in Granada, which was very minimal in here.
There were a few places and I have to remember as well, the
the first time that I was exposed to a subtitling
contraption in a little
room with lots of things around, it was actually in Ghent.
We had a formula and that's when we, I was exposed
to that sort of technology that we couldn't have in there.
And so we were sort of always late in there
and making all this
memory exercise.
I do remember that in 95 I wrote this article,
but as you can see, it's four pages, virtually nothing there.
And that was when I was I hadn't finished my PhD or anything,
but already this idea
that you have to publish and publish or perish was around already.
Simon said, okay, I'll give it a go and do something with the subtitling
that nobody knows about and see what it goes on.
What is it like?
And then he was as well.
And no, I just took the presence there.
But I came to a conference in 2002 to summit course in 2003, in I went
and there was this very shy student who didn't say anything
and they just went back.
I swear to God, I don't remember that.
I mentioned using subtitling for language
learning, but hey, I must say something.
I might have said something like that.
And then is this email coming my way?
All you were there and you know, you were talking about it was I.
And then the rest is history.
She came to visit us in in London at Imperial,
and I'm very, very thrilled to see how things have evolved
since those early beginnings.
But I didn't know what we were doing.
I don't know how many times
we discussed the exercises and the experiments and no, no, no.
That way you, you mix it with that one.
You do the other one. No, no, no, no. Back again tomorrow.
We'll continue talking tomorrow. Today.
We've made so many permutations, we don't know where we are any longer.
And so that was the beginning.
And it's a pleasure to see all this interest in here and all these people.
But of course, at the time when we started incorporating a little
bit of audio visual translation, it was all passive.
And then about passive consumption of audiovisual material,
it was always out there.
There were people
well before us working in this area and see how subtitles could be helpful
to learn a foreign language, and particularly a lady called
Martin, the man that was working with French in the USA.
So there was a little bit there.
There was also Robert Vander Blanc in the UK,
but none of the government that Lang was using
the with
the help of subtitles, he didn't speak any other languages.
Diana was going into lingual and in French and English.
But that was the sort of very, very basic things.
And to some extent, and to my mind, very limiting because it was okay,
you sit somewhat in front of the subtitles
and then you can just put the subtitles upside down or up or down.
But it was, it was the same exercise.
Just watch and read and no more than that.
So that was the way we started there.
And I remember at the beginning it was this feeling, and I have to
mention here my miracle as well,
that it was the feeling that you were teaching people
to learn a foreign language through subtitling,
and they thought that they were learning subtitling.
And there was a little bit of a challenge to say,
okay, now you're not learning subtitles,
you're not going to be a subtitle after two exercises.
And I'm doing another course with subtitles in here.
And that was, it was a battle
until we just discovered that actually we're going to sell it
in a different way. And I couldn't wait for a name.
And I'm really happy that, you know, now
didactic audio visual translation is being coined
and is a term that we can refer, and there is no misconceptions
that are coming along in that in the conversations.
But it was at the time the same with all the distribution.
It took forever to get all the description into any translation
schools because you don't translate what are the languages.
And in fact, many of the describe this don't speak another language.
They just do the description even within the same language.
So that was a different battle, but pretty similar about
we wanted to bring together to the area of translation.
And as I mentioned, this concept,
I want to just take a look at different things.
We've been talking about subtitling or dubbing in the sessions before here.
Captioning as well.
I'm in other areas,
but I wanted to touch on
some of the areas that I think are still potentially fruitful
and we haven't really gone much in detail
on these terms.
Like again, my memory lane when I was thinking about these
and getting nervous and just what can they say?
So I remember I was at a conference in
Copenhagen in 2001
was one of the ESD, the European Society for Translation,
and after that conference I just met a nice girl at the time from Sweden.
She was the only one
that spoke in Spanish when all the Spanish, as we all spoke
in English at the conference, she was a bit upset.
Oh, I'm the only one. Silly me speaking the Spanish here.
So we went for a drink and then in the conversation
transpired that, you know, she was talking about other things.
But, you know, she just mentioned, you know,
Oh, yes, it's very, very
challenging with your children when you've got children,
because when they have to watch the telly,
you know, you have to sit with them for a period
and show them the subtitles and read with them, because otherwise, my boy,
she hears us cry crying because the subtitles go
doesn't have the time and blah.
And he made me think about, you know, yes, we,
we do land for languages, but what about our mother?
Thanks.
And how you can always improve the use
of your mother tongue through the use of subtitles.
And it was funny when we had the earlier roundtable
about daddy legs or this.
How do you bring all these to primary education?
But that's something that in the UK has been going for a little while now
that you do focus now on the mother tongue, we had a very early
and dissident here
which was in India, and where they did was through intra
lingual subtitles in the same language to learn their mother tongue.
They just got quite a few children, particularly in deprived,
deprived areas of India, and it became really, really successful.
They just became it was called at the time the book box,
as I was reading it, was like a book, but it was in the box,
the telly on to such an extent you've got there.
Some of the statistics are more than doubled
the amount of literacy levels that they reached there
and so much so that now is legislation in India.
Programs for children
must have subtitles so they can learn their foreign language,
their mother tongue.
So we come to these funny periods
in 2019 that we are not allowed to go out.
We have to stay in.
And what do we all do?
Well, according to a statistic, banging in the middle, as in April,
we spend about 5 hours and 40 minutes watching telly, watching screens.
I swear to you that somebody was being watched
in Britain because I didn't spend that long.
So my part, my portion was used by somebody else to take it that way.
But is that this they are more from the USA.
If you think we've got our own body of our agency
for our communications in Britain,
which is called Ofcom Office of Communication, they actually say
that it was actually 6 hours and 25 minutes,
and that was a lot of time when more children
I don't have children myself,
but I can see the beauty of having a TV program
and then sit in front of there and stay quiet as long as you can.
And that's probably what most people did.
And from there we started getting all these
newspapers really focusing on
why don't we have the subtitles on the screen asking parents to
just put the telly, switch it on and get the subtitles,
because your children are not going to school, they're not doing anything.
And they should be improving their literacy levels.
And from there this initiative was launched, which is turn on.
The subtitles
is then backed by lots of people the likes of Stephen Fry, if you know.
And what they've done in
there is the world's biggest literacy project and it's for English
and learning English.
Although they want
they want to enlarge these and going in other directions.
They've helped over 300 million children, they say
is the most cost effective.
If you take into consideration
that the BBC subtitles everything, 100% of the programs,
it doesn't cost any money.
Yeah, it does cost us money to pay for our license fee.
But it is very straightforward and easy way of doing it.
There is actually a group of experts advising this team of among which
on this, because our costs go up and the confidence
is there involved.
And also part of the remit of Facebook,
for instance, is involved in there.
And then another area that I read a little bit and I was
excited when you mentioned as well
in private lives, is this idea of using subtitles
beyond language learning and things like that are
or is another way of life language learning for speech therapy
and particularly for people who have had have had an accident or an expose.
And then they just the way to start learning the language,
they apparently subtitles help them as well.
So there is a wide area of
disciplines that we could do in There are let me now
go to the same sort of topic from a different perspective,
which is the technology.
That's what I sort of I don't know, Ana, if the sort of remember
reminds you a little bit what it was like in those times.
That's the way we started.
And that was, wow, you know, somebody has got all those things
in just one little room and in our subtitles.
Now, from there, things have moved and evolved quite a lot.
And I'm going to go to the VHS.
Sometimes I just skip through the VHS.
My students don't even know what that looked like or what it was.
But I think in our case, you've got that sort of cycle moving.
And roughly every ten years we've been forced to buy new products and new
constructions and
tellies that are blended in one way and then they flat are better.
But now the new things are the best ones are the ones that are bending
the other way around.
Anything to get us to spend the money.
And those are the feels and the ways that we've been going
for translation of our audiovisual translation.
The VHS was crucial not only because that's the way I did
my day, otherwise I wouldn't have a video.
So I did it on VHS and Woody Allen and spent five years
without seeing Woody Allen on films, on telly, on paper.
It just gave me the, you know,
really not good vibes,
but he was essential in the way that we could
bring for the first time videos into the classroom
with our own control on how to use it and not to use it.
And I would use them in my university with subtitles.
It was the way that I could teach Spanish films with something was,
of course I now would discover with paper
a screen so that they wouldn't even see the subtitles
when I didn't want them to see that it was the way we were bringing media
to our classroom.
Then digitization came and it was all in all directions.
We could just digitize the images, the sound.
It was easy to have in just one little disc.
The subtitles adapt the version in the Spanish and Italian.
In French, two versions, two different
types of subtitles.
And that made it really, really different in the way
that we were perceiving things,
but in the way the students were also looking at things in there.
And that's when we had our first specialized software for subtitling.
And this is when we can start talking about
didactic and dynamic
subtitles, active subtitles,
because until then there was no possibility
that we could do anything like that we needed to have.
Otherwise, that was the software.
It was,
you know, prohibitive for anything,
that it wasn't professional subtitling.
So from there you've got one piece of software which is professional.
Then you've got as well.
It's subtitle workshop, which actually started
as a piece of software called they Are Poor Technology Group.
They were based in Vic outside of Barcelona and that's
what triggered this interest in using subtitles
to language learning and also to produce a few subtitles.
There was another one that was done at the University
of Barcelona called shortly to learn that was also used at the time.
And that is the way that everybody started doing subtitles to the extent.
And I still wonder that people have a spare time
and when they bought, what shall I do with my time?
I'm going to do something else.
Now, reading really?
Is that what you do find out too?
Because I guess on what we got in here as well is the first it's
been mentioned many times, the first really international project
that is looking at subtitles to learn languages with the technology
that would allow us to start getting engaged in this activity.
Our famous sleep lever always
side you do
have here lots of subtitles, commercial programs,
and you've got freeware that you can use as well.
Some companies have got their own subtitles on
when you thought that you were good.
We've got all these.
We're fine.
We're said, No, that's not true in the anymore.
We don't do software installed in your desktop.
It's probably matter. You need an update.
You need so many other things.
Why don't we go to the cloud?
And this is not a cloud.
Yeah, it's a metaphor.
Of course, nothing is up there is most likely
in a desert in Arizona or somewhere.
The desert probably doesn't bring this nice connotations
of the clouds and being somewhere ethereal and so on.
And this is where we're going.
This is the way that the industry is going.
And I think education has to go in the same way and in the same direction.
We were pioneers without realizing and I said,
God knows how many Browse in this clip.
Flash projects are academics,
teachers, technologists.
It's not quite the best.
A match made in heaven, Made in heaven.
So we had someone who was his own way to do the platform.
We were quite against some of the things
and eventually he was out with me quite in the right direction.
That was the cloud that they wanted to do.
Anklet Fly was that was the cloud just moving everything away
and opening other opportunities for participants as well
to communicate among themselves, to exchange information and so on.
But before Cliff Flower, we already had the clouds.
They sell it to us
as something really new that is always being working in the cloud.
When you do something like this for that, you never need to install
your own subtitle to your own software is going to the cloud.
You do it.
It's very basic, very easy,
but is enough for people to produce what they want it to produce.
So there's nothing new really in the way we're doing things.
But things are changing.
You've got here the interface of that, which is pretty similar
to the plot, the interfaces that we see these days.
This is one of the recent ones.
It wasn't like this at the beginning,
but pretty similar to what you see in other companies.
What are the advantages of the cloud?
But you don't need to install anything is easy.
So you've got students, they can bring their own laptops,
they can bring anything they want on a tablet,
and then they can start working in there
and they don't need to install absolutely anything.
You can do all the tasks that you can think of.
I'm not going into dubbing fairly already.
Talk about that, but I'm going to be concentrating more on subtitling.
So you can do
creation, you can give them a clip and they do anything from scratch.
Yeah. And they will produce their own translations.
You could also ask them to translate from a template
to give them the list of test in whichever language you want
and ask them to translate into the other language.
You can also ask them to review the work that other students
or their colleagues are done in the translation.
If you are more inclined to enhance the accessibility area,
then you can produce it on close captions and then you can move them
down, change colors and anything that you fancy doing with them.
You can also transcribe
and also feather discussed about things are very, very popular.
I'm not sure if popular is the right
word, but is very much in demand in the industry.
They need people to do transcriptions of anything in Spanish
and they need to have a very clean translation
with all the annotations that are going to be use
used when you translate into other languages.
So there is software to produce those documents.
And then I think the most exciting one here is that you can actually
get your subtitles,
get your video, merge them together, which in English is called burnt.
You burn them together and there you go with your video
with this app that you can post in your insta
or Facebook or anywhere that you want to have.
And this is something that until now, no subtitle improvement could do.
What you got was a video which was always empty.
You have subtitles which was an SRT or I love the
the one which is and dot eight SS which is really nice.
You can also do that if you wanted to.
And but that's not more than you could do, you know, with your classroom.
And the students always had that feeling that having completed,
you know, it's not done now is very, very simple to work that way as well.
This is what it looks like.
And I go into my you what else somebody has given me
a URL.
I just e my name, I put my password on, I start working.
This is the creation of my video.
I've got all the information at the bottom there
on how I visualize the information that is speaking about.
I can see my subtitles long, short, whatever and professional, of course.
Then I need to bear in mind such changes and things like that.
If I'm working with the translate, then what I've got in here
is the two areas, one for my translation, for the original,
one for the translation.
And then I don't need to worry too much
about the technology, the technological sides, particularly
if I don't have much time to spend with the students, or
if what I really want is to focus more on the linguistic side.
This is has become very, very popular.
So for instance, the European Parliament is now
about watch this space
is the first one of the three main bodies in the European Union
that has already got a user unit for voiceover and subtitling
and this is what they want with is already in the cloud.
And you can see is
I like this one in the sense that you can get lots of information.
You know, it's quite easy to exploit that for educational purposes.
You've got annotations,
you've got information, extra information you can communicate
with the other colleagues working in their same program.
And it's very sort of intuitive in the way you do it.
I'm that old that when I was teaching subtitling at the beginning,
some of the students will cry and think
that they will never be able to do it.
Now it takes me 10 minutes and they already have them.
Five subtitles
and I'm still trying to finish my explanation,
but they are already working on doing it.
So it really has changed radically the dimension, the technical dimension.
And then you've got here
Netflix
interface as well, which again, you know,
gives the students or the trainees to be translators and subtitles.
That idea
that you actually you're not mimicking anything, you're actually working
with the software.
That is pretty much what is done in the industry.
And that also,
at least from the translation perspective,
I've got that so that they powerful motivation from the students.
Now what do we have there with the current platforms.
Well they don't professional which is nice their own private
which is not so nice because you're not going
to be able to use any of those unless you're working for them.
And then there is one, the one that I show you
that is a hybrid that you can get
but is not really suitable for educational purposes.
Are we done?
We kind of store information there so the companies do
and it's in the server of the company, but you as a participant,
as a student, wouldn't
be able to have anything there, which is not good for us.
You want to have the material.
Not only that, you want to do interfaces for the student
and the teacher.
When you can host the exams where you can give them feedback or whatever.
None of the platforms now are there.
And I had on a having changed my PowerPoint,
you know, we need an educational platform to do things.
And I was just delighted to see to have this sneak preview earlier
on today of what is possibly going to be the first ever good platform
that is being geared to education and that it is,
you know,
easy, intuitive and that I wouldn't see why not.
A large company selling books for educational purposes
could probably sponsor every year, which is £800.
€150 are a company
that does only books and language learning and so on.
Could be an idea and probably some of the exercises
could be incorporated in those books that they sell.
Just saying.
But I know that anybody
telling me what this map is and I'll give you something.
I put it once and somebody told me, Oh, yes, it's a map of the world.
Yeah, I kind of told you there you go to this product,
but it's a bit more
than that.
And some sort of
annoying
gray.
Well, isn't it annoying that.
Gray There isn't the spotlight there on China, which is not only China.
You see at the top, there is North Korea as well, the second country.
And then, funnily enough, in the middle of the Middle East
that red
obligation, middle, middle Syria,
I and
it is the world according to Netflix
which is even more you know they've been doing
Mandarin Chinese or simplified and traditional from day
one or nearly from day one so the gray they just to mislead us
but they've translated into Chinese they do Korean clearly South Korea
and then so any fact they covering the whole world
and they what they call themselves the providers the streamers
you can do use them in any screen and they've been
essential in translation.
They've been the disruptors in audiovisual translation.
Forget about Amazon, Disney, plus HBO.
None of them has had the impact that Netflix is having.
But not only in our profession
as well in translation and language
learning.
I can now in the UK watch anything in Chinese, in Taipei,
in Indonesian, Bahasa, in Italian, which the BBC has never allowed me to.
Even though I pay every month,
I'd give them my money
and none of the other TV stations
and I do have my DVDs, which I never threw away.
I did throw my VHS, but never my DVDs.
But sadly I don't have a DVD player, so I'm
pretty much in the same situation.
So it is only through these portals that I can really engage
with other communities, engaged
with languages that until now, I guess good.
And of course, one of the main
triggers here was parasite, this Korean
TV film.
And then this quote from the director, You only need those
that inch and then you are able to jump over that.
And who cannot do all of one inch?
Then you are in a different world.
It's a little bit like Alice in Wonderland.
You go the animal.
I'm just watching something else and in a different world.
He was very clever in the way they did it.
And then once I became the first non-English to want to win the Oscar,
not just the non English or in a different language
and I need this triggered lots of changes all throughout
together with the collaboration with Netflix.
Now I live as you know in the UK and you can see here for instance,
we've got these ideas, okay, Netflix is here,
you can watch anything in their language.
Which language is the one that the English speakers are more
happy to learn? Spanish, of course.
So no Abel Espanol.
Clearly the person who wrote the article doesn't are nor
any question mark.
Nothing so clearly doesn't
but is trying her is in her very best his very best
to convince the rest of the Brits to speak other languages.
Good luck, James.
I'm And then from there
we start is much more of in the mainstream.
This is one of the main newspapers in the country.
They're starting to talk about,
you know, languages and doing these and that.
And then what we find now is that, for instance,
the degrees in Korean are increasing in the UK.
And just like that because we've game came
because all these k-drama normally that if I want to go to a
Korean restaurant in London, either I kill
someone that is already in the line or I have to book
like seven months ahead because everybody wants to go Korean.
So it's not the power of language is not the power
of how we communicate,
but it's what all trickles is all the things that come along or that do.
You know, when I was teaching Spanish at the time so itself
and you know, when we had the highest the biggest hike
in students doing Spanish,
we've had the institute institutes run this is spending lots of money
the government mean doing medical bed in London
and teaching people in Spanish.
And one year the numbers went through the roof
really doing the
Spanish when they can into Madrid.
And then all the kids wanted to learn so that they could follow football.
Beckham was very clever as well.
And, you know, I'm very happy that I'm going to Madrid.
My children will be bilingual.
And that was one of the things that he said,
and that was one of the triggers.
So you see how the power of this will can really empower
people to learn other languages on another day.
So and as I said, here is not just the language,
it is also we get now I think, you know, they might even change
the way that viewers think and feel about other cultures.
And I know we don't.
They are waiting.
Yeah, we're talking always about foreign language learning.
Second language learning.
But I could hear throughout these conversations, we're also
bringing in our inclusion and diversity into our videos.
We are bringing in
racial issues and real life
issues that will allow us to also do the language and the culture.
But this is something that I can see with excitement
around this new I don't know if, you know, they just opened recently
month or so, a new
building in L.A.
And they rent it is going to be learning in spanish
through audiovisual media.
That is the main approach
of all the languages that netflix, apart from english,
the first language is the spanish and the second is korean.
But the korean comes up very second one.
So there is a lot of power in there and that advantage
has got links with Netflix and so on.
And this book
that was published very recently on how Spanish can be learned
through their power of of subtitling and audiovisual translation.
Now that is a little bit on on the sort of
traditional side of subtitling, but I wanted to bring you to the East,
to the Far East.
I think we've got some colleagues in here. I was talking to her
and I want to see what do they do.
I said anything that we can learn or we can just get it from them.
Now, this is traditionally when I was talking to you
about bilingual subtitles, typically you go to Brussels,
you get to the cinema, and then first light, you've got two lights.
One is French, the other one is Flemish.
Maybe the reverse.
Why French first and Flemish second.
Both platforms first. Second.
You can get political with anything whenever you want.
You want.
So that's one way.
But that is the conceptualization
we've always had about bilingual subtitles.
Here you have, and this is the nice things of technology after bulb,
because I can't do anything.
It looks very nice, but I cannot touch it.
So let me see if I can do it now. Right.
You see the
English language change my life.
I was born in Hong Kong and I immigrated to North America.
Couldn't speak a word of English.
English is not my first language.
In fact, it's not even my second language.
It is my third language.
So growing up, I didn't speak a word of English,
but because I invested the time and the effort to understand
and master language in communication
sales, being able to communicate, speak with,
convince and certainty, that has changed my life.
And now, of course, I have a massive following on social media.
I have been interviewed hundreds of times on media and podcasts.
I've written a dozen books simply because of one simple thing
that I did, because I have Master
the skill, the language of English.
But I think modesty broadly also played a role there.
But anyway, he's very, very popular and he's done all these things
so you can see the other way that now
if I talk to my students in my classroom
about bilingual subtitles, that what comes to their mind.
So they're hearing the original, they reading the original,
and then they also have in the translation into Chinese.
This is tremendously popular, so much so we started with fun subbing,
which you might knowledge all these fanatics of subtitling.
And it's so popular that many TV stations in the country
are is embracing having bilingual subtitles
because that's the way that the younger generation wants to learn.
But then again, nothing needs new into lingual bilingual subtitles,
where already during the silent periods,
the Chinese films had the Chinese subtitles
and then the inter lingual ones into English.
And with the idea of language learning,
you can get them with pinging so that you can see how it is
pronounced or how it's done.
If you don't realize or you don't know the character.
So you got you can get lots of combinations in there to do it.
Now you might think, and I know that one of my colleagues, one
of my colleagues from
Salamanca said, I've tried this with some Spanish students.
They hate it.
You know, this is not going to work.
Well, maybe I don't know.
This is what people have been doing.
Now, let's see.
And I think some of you were like, well, ask asking for these.
Let's see then what is these language learning with Netflix?
The language language learning with Netflix
makes learning languages more effective and enjoyable.
It allows you to improve your skills
on your own by watching films and series in the language you study.
Build your listening comprehension
with hundreds of hours of authentic language in context.
Listen to the dialog phrase by phrase at your own pace.
Subtitles are presented simultaneously with a translation.
There's also a pop up dictionary by comparing the translation
with the original audio and text,
you can learn a lot in a short amount of time.
The most important words for you to learn are highlighted.
Take your studies into the real world.
With language learning, with Netflix
that's in language, learning languages happy make people happy.
So it was very Chinese.
It was really that kind of really work.
This Netflix Chinese company is working with Netflix,
and that's actually what the Chinese have been doing for many years.
It's something on going there.
Well, yes, You've got the language reactor.
It's cold now and so you've got the new language reactor.
You can choose the language that you want to land
English, Spanish, German, whatever, actually is not just Netflix.
And I guess the name has been changed.
I have done my research fully,
but I'm pretty sure that they were
using the name of Netflix to bring in people
and they have to change the language reactor.
So what it is in effect is an extension
that you just add to your computer.
It stays there in your corner.
And every time
that you just want to with YouTube and you can see that it with YouTube
automatically generates bilingual subtitles that you choose
the ones you want.
And with Netflix, you've got a Gruppo, a collection of films there
that you can also go and choose you want to do.
So you've got in here, this is telling me that I'm talking
enough.
So there you go for Netflix,
but also for YouTube that you can use this language reactor.
How does it work? More or less.
I'm trying to go through here.
I've made a little recording so that you can see what I've chosen.
Here is Netflix more or less the same.
I've chosen with Tatu YouTube,
Tata Cube, which is basically YouTube, and then you've got here.
So what I've chosen here
is that I wanted to do, as you can see on the top German into Spanish.
Yeah.
And I can see there and I'm going to choose my level,
which is level beginner, level one, and this gives me a menu
and I've got this.
There's a stack, a bunch of food often stuck on those spelling
on your snack. Food
and then he tells me what gefilte is.
He pronounces it for me.
So I know the way it should be.
I'm going to make a phone instead of a bar.
So I'm getting type.
There's a song written on it for them spits and she.
Spits and spear.
And then I get my translation and I can see.
So as the principal, instead.
Of we want us to establish the dots on some of our.
Tablature.
And then now what is sometimes audio can be a bit misleading in here
is that both the translation and the dictionary go their own way.
So I can see Terblanche in it and then the translation
doesn't mention anything like that. It mentioned something different.
So it has to take it takes a while to adjust to see
if that is going to be appropriate for beginners
or more advanced people working in the field.
I did another video for Netflix, but since my alarm
is telling me that I'm talking a bit too much, I'm going to skip that one.
I show you another thing that is looking to the east.
Does anybody know what these is?
This funny words?
I won't even try to pronounce the Chinese ones.
I've even tried with my intonations and see what they are.
But tell up I can.
But the other ones I don't.
I guess somebody is smiling
so somebody might know what they are.
So Connell and Dunmore on both of them.
You might not, but it is very pretty much from the far east.
And is all these participatory.
Culture is just engaging in the way that you are going to enjoy
an audiovisual production now that talent
which is probably the easiest one in here or the simpler
one is, was developed in Japan in the eighties
and it is a shortening for television opaque projector out there
and it is text that is superimposed on the images,
but it could be subtitles, but it could be anything.
It looks a little bit like this.
So you've got people and text all over there
and basically what it is, it can be
appears anytime, anywhere in any color
with any font, even sometimes Ismailis and things like that.
And it can be used very often for explanations
and most crucially as well, to sum up what somebody saying,
so does somebody say something like a table actually is saying
remember to bring home.
This can be very manipulative in the way it is, but it is a way
of engaging with the audience, with the meat, with the media, and
presenting information that
goes beyond what our traditional subtitles.
Then you go, Well, it looks a bit like this.
So you go on the Today program title.
Then you've got the other information that we cannot see because Zoom
is covering that part, and then you've got the interpretation
of what it is they tell you about the baseball player
thought what he's thinking notes.
And then similarly here,
but this interaction between images and text in the forest is very,
very common,
which is something that is very, very uncommon in in the Western world.
We don't one text and once the films become talkies,
the text is only Paris 2020 and quickly out there,
everybody knows where they are,
but we don't really now we play a little bit more,
but I assume that you do do stupid things
in catalog becomes a hit and you.
Oh, wow. Oh, creative reading.
No, it's text on the screen. There's not much more than that.
But because nobody was doing that, it just becomes really, really exciting.
So that's one thing.
Then you've got to count to account
for the time I was close, our eyes closed not too far.
It is text.
And this is copying a little bit the Japanese, these Chinese people
in their spare time that they don't know what to do. They do subtitles.
And then on those subtitles they add extra information.
And part of that extra information is usually
to express their feelings or comments.
Yeah, usually sardonic, ironic.
So you've got here,
you know, they they comments can be humorous, sarcastic,
and it's a way of the translator that is a very lonely situation.
But you're doing yourself this although you've got
lots of people in front of you, they never talk to you.
You are on your own.
There is a way of engaging with the audience.
So telling them, Oh, you know, I'm doing this for you
and you're watching my translations or whatever, that sort of engagement.
I find it difficult for myself given my age to engage that way.
But I can see why it is interesting for people and why, particularly
in a period of lockdown when everybody's at home
and going to do much more than that
is a way of communicating with each other and getting there.
So you get these and people are laughing here.
So you've got text on the top.
Nobody's talking.
There's no silence in this scene, but then
text appears on the top of the screen.
What does it mean if nobody's talking there?
But that is it, roughly.
I think the translation, the little mouse is half naked.
I am not calm anymore.
Yeah, I'm doing this up. Who is the little mouse?
But he eats the little mouse and he's naked.
I guess either not boy or girl doing the subtitles.
And hey, is he going to get. Any.
More exciting than this?
And then it's that sort of information
that they're incorporating, and it is engaging.
That's why
I can see now why people be, Oh, I'm going to do something else for fun
or I'm bored.
I'm going to do a few subtitles and do something.
But there is another way of engaging the students,
not just the typical translation, but maybe with other activities.
I'm playing with the information and then probably my favorite
one is done, which is much easier to pronounce, I think,
which is literally translated roughly
one letter written or a bullet fire,
but one lit curtain is the one that is made it more in the translation.
Again, user generated text.
So you get kids to produce the texts and
you can do several things with this application.
Subtitling is one of those, so you can produce subtitles.
With this application, you can use it to add referential information.
You think that the translation is not clear enough, so you add information.
Oh, this is a cultural reference in Spanish that means blah, blah, blah.
So you just add more information. Watch out.
Now he's going to get naked in the next scene.
So everybody's waiting up.
I remember somebody told me somebody that is in the film
and apparently they didn't want him.
There was some scandal in the media
and they wanted to get rid of the actor.
And then in the scene, he says, well, I don't know whether I'm going to be
here much longer.
And then somebody sends the message, Oh, I don't think so in the media.
So that sort of interaction,
finding cheek, but engaging the people in there.
And then you've got as well recreational that you are,
you know, being funny, humorous or whatever.
The beauty of this
is that in some cinemas when they started, you had to pay.
So you pay for an amount of money.
To send an amount of text is a bit like Twitter,
so you can write more than that.
And rather than having popcorn, you're just spending your money
sending this information cleverly enough.
You get the same film is never the same film
because the comments are going to be different and people sometimes
go to see different comments and different information in there.
This is what it looks like
and people
apparently see that this is static and that is what it looks like,
that I show you a normal.
Dialog
that depicts the four guys
that like
right down.
To the. Met.
You get an idea of what is it that they do
and what is it that they pass in.
Their information is already being
theorized and is being looked into by Letizia.
I think her Spanish name is done
on her supervisor in Barcelona.
I've before I think they both on an is the use of this type of activity
for learners of Spanish in China.
So it is becoming very trendy and popular in there
to have the information and
let me see, I forgot what I was good.
I need to Celia so I need to go.
So you think it's crazy?
You know, these Chinese are mental.
They can read all this information? Probably. They are.
Probably they know it.
But hey, brother, you get now.
So if you thought that was really far removed, YouTube has already come up
with something.
You could see things in English and Spanish and Italian
for people to engage and start communicating and added
that sort of information is Go Muji
you can download it freely from from the Internet,
and then you've got there all the specifications of what you can do.
So just watch this space over you to students are going to be doing
and how they're going to be communicating.
That probably will help us to teach them
in the way that we would like, they would like to be taught.
Thank you very, very much. But think
and you said you
didn't have much to say.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Questions, comments.
The mic is there
nothing to
that really.
Okay.
To me,
they always have something. It's
always. People.
The first one is.
Always
Thank you very much.
I'm glad you didn't have much to say.
That was really interesting.
And thank you very much for being here.
And so that in 1990 we only beat some in order
to keep what's coming next.
My comment was I was thinking before that, you know, that
with subtitling, that's a new trend that people are using
for many different reasons, not just for studying or
learning or different languages, even for their own language.
And I know there's been quite polemic in the UK now that
they're filming lots of things and the sound is not very good
because they're trying to do it atmospheric.
So if someone says ahead, then the sound is not that good.
Some people are complaining.
So a lot of people right now using subtitles
unable to follow in the normal series and I know there's quite a bit
to think about that, but you know that you are far, far away.
I was quite surprised at some is this is the direction where we're going?
Well, I don't know.
I don't know
if we are going in that direction, but I can tell you is what I can see.
I find it very surprising that
anytime I ask my students in China, you've done subtitles.
Do you like subtitles?
They are only subtitles that they think of
for the it comes to their minds is others.
And they said, Well, we just do it because we want to learn English.
And that's why we're here now in London,
because we've been really practicing with these
and looking and seeing the translation a lot.
So it has become sort of natural there.
And I thought it was very sort of niche area.
I don't believe and we don't know much.
There is a little bit of that is the numbers usually are with Chinese
participants, not in other languages.
So we know that in Chinese is engaging and students like it.
But would it be the same in other languages?
And what they found is that, you know, I don't think you can read
all the information.
You know, one of the ones I put there, it was like two lines.
But then again, I'm thinking of that as a very old traditional consumption
of audiovisual material, which is linear.
And I am one of those that if
the film had started in the cinema in one minute, I wasn't working.
So No, no, no, no, no.
It's like, you know, if you start a book,
you finish your book, it doesn't matter.
Even if these are parents and you have to do it for a while,
I'll finish the same with cinema.
I want what I want.
Walk in because it's 2 minutes then.
But kids are watching in a different way.
And you can see this Netflix, they just stopping.
They going find the video is 20 minutes.
I'm going to spend an hour but I'm going to be stopping the Netflix.
What I did was actually stopping
and you can stop on any word and he's giving you the translation
of any of the words.
And then you can see the little one,
which is word by word, and then the one underneath.
Of course, if we think with our perspective
of how to watch traditional subtitles, this doesn't make sense.
But if you have got another perspective that you are
watching in a different way that you don't mind stopping
and checking here and there, then that really makes more sense.
And that's what I think is is changing.
That's why, you know,
the likes of Netflix are the ones that are using this
as material have gone for those subtitles.
Now those bilingual ones and adding all this information.
So there must be something in there.
Yeah, but do you think when you have
different lines on the screen, would you just follow
one person writing. What you do?
Do you to know?
Yeah.
At least I don't know about that.
I wouldn't spend more than 5 minutes watching that,
but I know my kids, my students, they always like it.
They'd always very excited and they they partake.
So those are they we said, you know, it's this great creation.
You need to create these skills that will motivate you to
work, to write on sort of creatively, not just write
about your dog on your weekends, but it is watching something.
What does it come to your mind?
And they seem to be very happy to just write anything and be happy.
I don't know.
I think at one point you can also get lights
and then if you get more lights then people like you tweets or you
the information that you're sending. So you feel probably more
excited, you write more and the things.
So there's another way.
There is a lot,
but I haven't read about the effect theory on how that really motivates
people to do things.
And this is now being looking are being looked at
for media studies as well to see how people engage with these
are beyond the actual watching and basing watching.
You can be a bit like gaming as well.
The gamification and so on.
So there's a lot of that.
I don't know if he's going to change,
but he's clearly there and the likes of YouTube is now
doing something similar that you can do now in the Spanish.
Before he was only Chinese and he was all we could buy,
but not to be investing, however, amount to other languages as well. So
one more question.
I think we have time for
a comment.
It was really, really enlightening to you and
I really enjoyed listening to you.
I think since everybody's tired, myself included,
I had like a lot of things I had thought I could
say to close this conference.
But I think the closure for him was
has already been, well,
top company and with a lot of food for thought.
That really encompasses everything that we've been listening to here.
Well, not me, not that much, but I read the abstract.
So I know what you were talking about.
For me, didactic and visual translation has the perfect
ingredients for learning, which is which are really motivation,
direct action, and.
And what is the other one?
And yes, and then outcome.
You know, I am a cinema lover, so I need to be motivated
to do the things individuals do that direct action.
I'm a dancer, so I need action in my life.
And and the result, of course, I'm obsessed with having things.
We've seen things done. And you know, me
and I think a students like that a lot.
And that's part
of the whole circle of motivation, really acting and making things
and what what all that really I mean, the reward of all
that is seeing people smiling while they learn, smiling,
while they teach, smiling, while they're research.
And I think we saw a lot of people smile here during these days.
And I think that's the great idea.
I think the most important part of doing of being part of
didactic activities, of translation is this
smiling.
You enjoy the enjoy and,
you know, and everything adds up to that, right?
And at the end, not only Title IX has made people
like more than 2000 people enjoyed, enjoy
because we had more than 2000 people, members of the platform
that was used for teaching and everything else.
But since we started with this craziness
at the beginning of the century
and at the end, we had a lot of people who
who really enjoyed and smiled and could benefit from this.
Students who I thank for
being part of this learning, and teachers and colleagues and
and researchers and yeah, everybody with his or her own dance.
And I'm always using this image
and think we made a good flashmob up these three days together,
a flashmob that will continue somehow
at different points in different ways, in different directions.
And I hope
and I hope well, yeah, you can share those dances with us
and we can share them together in the near future.
We'll be in touch.
Thank you. Thank you.