This book, a first in its kind, offers a survey of the present state of affairs in media accessibility research and practice. It focuses on professional practices which are relative newcomers within the field of audiovisual translation and media studies, namely, audio description for the blind and visually impaired, sign language, and subtitling for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing for television, DVD, cinema, internet and live performances.Thanks to the work of lobbying groups and the introduction of legislation in some countries, media accessibility is an area that has recently gained marked visibility in our society. It has begun to appear in university curricula across Europe, and is the topic of numerous specialised conferences. The target readership of this book is first and foremost the growing number of academics involved in audiovisual translation at universities ? researchers, teachers and students ? but it is also of interest to the ever-expanding pool of practitioners and translators, who may wish to improve their crafts. The collection also addresses media scholars, members of deaf and blind associations, TV channels, and cinema or theatre managements who have embarked on the task of making their programmes and venues accessible to the visually and hearing impaired.Table of contentsAcknowledgementsJorge DIAZ CINTAS, Pilar ORERO, Aline REMAEL: Media for all: a global challengeSection 1: Subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH) Aline REMAEL: Sampling subtitling for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing in EuropeClive MILLER: Access symbols for use with video content and information and communications technology devicesChristopher STONE: Deaf access for Deaf people: the translation of the television news from English into British Sign LanguageJoselia NEVES: A world of change in a changing worldVera Lucia SANTIAGO ARAUJO: Subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing in BrazilSection 2: Audio description (AD) Pilar ORERO: Sampling audio description in EuropeJoan GREENING, Deborah ROLPH: Accessibility: raising awareness of audio description in the UKGert VERCAUTEREN: Towards a European guideline for audio descriptionAndrew SALWAY: A corpus-based analysis of audio descriptionJulian BOURNE, Catalina JIMENEZ HURTADO: From the visual to the verbal in two languages: a contrastive analysis of the audio description of The Hours in English and SpanishKarin De COSTER, Volkmar MUHLEIS: Intersensorial translation: visual art made up by wordsAnna MATAMALA, Pilar ORERO: Accessible opera in Catalan: opera for allGreg YORK: Verdi made visible: audio introduction for opera and balletJessica YEUNG: Audio description in the Chinese worldNotes on contributorsIndex

Captioning and Subtitling for d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing Audiences is a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of captioning and subtitling, a discipline that has evolved quickly in recent years. This guide is of a practical nature and contains examples and exercises at the end of each chapter. Some of the tasks stimulate reflection on the practice and reception, while others focus on particular captioning and SDH areas, such as paralinguistic features, music and sound effects. The requirements of d/Deaf and hard of hearing audiences are analysed in detail and are accompanied by linguistic and technical considerations. These considerations, though shared with generic subtitling parameters, are discussed specifically with d/Deaf and hard of hearing audiences in mind. The reader will become familiar with the characteristics of d/Deaf and hard of hearing audiences, and the diversity – including cultural and linguistic differences – within this group of people. Based on first-hand experience in the field, the book also provides a step-by-step guide to making live performances accessible to d/Deaf and hard of hearing audiences. As well as exploring all linguistic and technical matters related to the creation of captions, aspects related to the overall set up of the captioned performance are discussed. The guide will be valuable reading to students of audiovisual translation at undergraduate and postgraduate level, to professional subtitlers and captioners, and to any organisation or venue that engages with d/Deaf and hard of hearing people.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Media provides the first comprehensive account of the role of translation in the media, which has become a thriving area of research in recent decades. It offers theoretical and methodological perspectives on translation and media in the digital age, as well as analyses of a wide diversity of media contexts and translation forms. Divided into four parts with an editor introduction, the 33 chapters are written by leading international experts and provide a critical survey of each area with suggestions for further reading. The Handbook aims to showcase innovative approaches and developments, bridging the gap between currently separate disciplinary subfields and pointing to potential synergies and broad research topics and issues. With a broad-ranging, critical and interdisciplinary perspective, this Handbook is an indispensable resource for all students and researchers of translation studies, audiovisual translation, journalism studies, film studies and media studies.

This work considers the impact of technology on our command of (foreign) languages, and the effects that our (lack of) linguistic skills have on technology, even though modern communications technology implies mulitlingualism, yet at the same time paves the way for the development of a "lingua franca". The challenges are not only industrial, political, social administrative, judicial, ethical; they are also cultural and linguistic. This volume is a collection of essays and the edited results of some of the presentations and debates from two international forums on the subject.

This engaging study traces the development of closed captioning—a field that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s from decades-long developments in cinematic subtitling, courtroom stenography, and education for the deaf. Gregory J. Downey discusses how digital computers, coupled with human mental and physical skills, made live television captioning possible. Downey's survey includess the hidden information workers who mediate between live audiovisual action and the production of visual track and written records. His work examines communication technology, human geography, and the place of labor in a technologically complex and spatially fragmented world. Illustrating the ways in which technological development grows out of government regulation, education innovation, professional profit-seeking, and social activism, this interdisciplinary study combines insights from several fields, among them the history of technology, human geography, mass communication, and information studies.

The work of writing closed captions for television and DVD is not simply transcribing dialogue, as one might assume at first, but consists largely of making rhetorical choices. For Sean Zdenek, when captioners describe a sound they are interpreting and creating contexts, they are assigning significance, they are creating meaning that doesn t necessarily exist in the soundtrack or the script. And in nine chapters he analyzes the numerous complex rhetorical choices captioners make, from abbreviating dialogue so it will fit on the screen and keep pace with the editing, to whether and how to describe background sounds, accents, or slurred speech, to nonlinguistic forms of sound communication such as sighing, screaming, or laughing, to describing music, captioned silences (as when a continuous noise suddenly stops), and sarcasm, surprise, and other forms of meaning associated with vocal tone. Throughout, he also looks at closed captioning style manuals and draws on interviews with professional captioners and hearing-impaired viewers. Threading through all this is the novel argument that closed captions can be viewed as texts worthy of rhetorical analysis and that this analysis can lead the entertainment industry to better standards and practices for closed captioning, thereby better serve the needs of hearing-impaired viewers. The author also looks ahead to the work yet to be done in bringing better captioning practices to videos on the Internet, where captioning can take on additional functions such as enhancing searchability. While scholarly work has been done on captioning from a legal perspective, from a historical perspective, and from a technical perspective, no one has ever done what Zdenek does here, and the original analytical models he offers are richly interdisciplinary, drawing on work from the fields of technical communication, rhetoric, media studies, and disability studies."