Talk: "Challenges for the Audiovisual Industry in the Digital Age: Accessibility and Multilingualism"

Every facet of life in the 21^st century is defined by technological advances in digitisation and networked communication, which result in endless information exchange. Such developments would seem to uphold the very core of democracy as regards freedom of speech and accessibility of information. But is information truly accessible? 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 speakers of different languages as well as to people with disabilities, who have the inalienable right to quality of life. Such demand is only going to increase exponentially in the years to come. This is certainly true of the audiovisual industry, as translated audiovisual content made available through the various distribution channels that exist today probably reaches a wider audience than any other type of translation. The audiovisual industry is thus experiencing an ever increasing demand for audiovisual translation services, yet at the same time is forced to contend with the reduction of budgets as well as the contraction of timeframes in which these services need to be provided. As an industry which has strong links with and is heavily influenced by changes in technology, it is only natural to turn to language technology experts seeking from them solutions to meet the demand and deliver quality end products.

Short Biography

Yota Georgakopoulou holds a PhD in Subtitling from the University of Surrey. She has taught translation and subtitling at the University of Westminster and the University of Surrey, where she is currently appointed as external examiner for the postgraduate programs in translation and audiovisual media. She is a member of ESIST, the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation, and has published one book and several articles on subtitling and audio description, while she is also a frequent guest speaker at universities and colleges in Greece and the UK. Yota joined the European Captioning Institute in 2000 and has held the position of Managing Director since 2004. ECI offers a variety of services in over 70 languages including subtitling, captioning, specialised translation, voice over, audio description and transcription, and is a leading company in multi-language DVD subtitling.