About
28
Publications
15,764
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
551
Citations
Introduction
I am an independent audiovisual localization consultant, designing and executing bespoke projects on localization strategy, quality, tools, workflows, and language resource and data management.
I hold a PhD in translation and subtitling from the University of Surrey and have 25 years of experience in the audiovisual localization industry. I implemented the first university modules on audiovisual translation in the UK, served as the Managing Director of the European Captioning Institute and most recently as Senior Director, Research & Int’l Development, at Deluxe Entertainment Services Group.
My research interests include audiovisual localization, accessibility, crowdsourcing, machine translation, speech recognition, CAT tools, translation big data and the democratization of translation.
Current institution
Athena Consultancy
Current position
- Consultant
Publications
Publications (28)
This paper addresses the problem of evaluating the quality of automatically generated subtitles, which includes not only the quality of the machine-transcribed or translated speech, but also the quality of line segmentation and subtitle timing. We propose SubER - a single novel metric based on edit distance with shifts that takes all of these subti...
https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/6d5db56d-5160-11eb-b59f-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-PDF/source-189601616
_________________________________________________________ Abstract The use of English template files in the creation of multilanguage subtitles from the same source audio assets, typically English, was one of the greatest innovations in the subtitling industry at the turn of the century. It streamlined processes, eliminated duplication of work, red...
In this work, we customized a neural machinetranslation system for translation of subtitles in the domain of entertainment. The neural translation model was adapted to the subtitling content and style and extended by a simple, yet effective technique for utilizing inter-sentence context for short sentences such as dialog turns. The main contributio...
This article reports a multifaceted comparison between statistical and neural machine translation (MT) systems that were developed for translation of data from massive open online courses (MOOCs). The study uses four language pairs: English to German, Greek, Portuguese, and Russian. Translation quality is evaluated using automatic metrics and human...
The present work describes a multilingual corpus of online content in the educational domain, i.e. Massive Open Online Course material, ranging from course forum text to subtitles of online video lectures, that has been developed via large-scale crowdsourcing. The English source text is manually translated into 11 European and BRIC languages using...
The limited availability of in-domain training data is a major issue in the training of application-specific neural machine translation models. Professional outsourcing of bilingual data collections is costly and often not feasible. In this paper we analyze the influence of using crowdsourcing as a scalable way to obtain translations of target in-d...
We present a parallel wikified data set of parallel texts in eleven language pairs from the educational domain. English sentences are lined up to sentences in eleven other languages (BG, CS, DE, EL, HR, IT, NL, PL, PT, RU, ZH) where names and noun phrases (entities) are manually annotated and linked to their respective Wikipedia pages. For every li...
This paper reports on a comparative evaluation of phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) and neural machine translation (NMT) for four language pairs, using the PET interface to compare educational domain output from both systems using a variety of metrics, including automatic evaluation as well as human rankings of adequacy and fluen...
Recent decades have brought significant changes in the subtitling industry, both in terms of workflow and in the context of the market for audiovisual translation (AVT). Machine translation (MT), whilst in regular use in the traditional localisation industry, has not seen a significant uptake in the subtitling arena. The SUMAT project, an EU-funded...
SUMAT is a project funded through the EU ICT Policy Support Programme (2011–2014). It involves four subtitling companies (InVision, DDS, Titelbild, VSI) and five technical partners (ALS, ATC, TextShuttle, University of Maribor, Vicomtech).For the SUMAT project, translated subtitles for seven language pairs have been collected. Four subtitling compa...
We describe the preparation of parallel corpora based on professional quality subtitles in seven European language pairs. The main focus is the effect of the processing steps on the size and quality of the final
corpora.
This paper describes the data collection and parallel corpus compilation activities carried out in the FP7 EU-funded SUMAT project. This project aims to develop an online subtitle translation service for nine European languages combined into 14 different language pairs. This data provides bilingual and monolingual training data for statistical mach...
Every facet of life in the 21st century is defined by technological advances in digitisation and networked communication, which result in endless information exchange. The mind boggling amount of content made available every day through a variety of media has already resulted in an increased need for making such information accessible both to speak...
We all know what subtitles are. Luyken et al. (1991: 31) define them as:
… condensed written translations of original dialogue which appear as lines of text, usually positioned towards the foot of the screen. Subtitles appear and disappear to coincide in time with the corresponding portion of the original dialogue and are almost always added to the...
In this paper I will discuss recent developments in the subtitling field since the emergence of DVD. The digital format is changing the face of the rapidly expanding subtitling industry as new demands are calling for a new working methodology and the notion of the 'template' is born. The description of the way template files are produced and used i...
