The Symbiotic Match of AVT & Tech Industry State-Of-The-Art and Way Forward

Serenella Massidda

doi:10.13125/rhesis/5706

Serenella Massidda

DOI: https://doi.org/10.13125/rhesis/5706

Keywords: Audiovisual Translation, internet, subtitling, Translation Technologies, Video Streaming on Demand

Abstract

The Audiovisual Translation (AVT) sector and the Tech industry have been inseparable, a symbiotic match. In the AVT field, the introduction of the DVD in 1995 was the most significant development in the field of AVT, profoundly influencing the nature of professional practices. It had «repercussions not only in the way audiovisual programmes started to be packaged, marketed and consumed, but also from a quantitative perspective» (Díaz-Cintas 2013: 119). Yet, the greatest catalyst of changes in communications and AVT has always been the Internet (Díaz-Cintas 2013: 119). In the last decade, the world around us has radically altered. On a daily basis, we are immersed in an audiovisual reality, surrounded by Video Streaming on Demand (SVoD) systems, where players like Netflix spend billions of dollars in new productions reaching volumes of content that were impossible only a decade ago. New experiments with advanced technologies applied to AVT have been consistently carried out since 2000 to meet the demands of SVoD systems: automatic speech recognition (ASR) able to ‘understand’ the voices in a dialogue, and neural machine translation (NMT) processes have been applied to the production of subtitled versions of films and TV shows to a large extent, generating new roles in the industry and creating new debates about the ethics of technology in the AVT industry.

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