Pilar Orero

Aggregate gaze visualization with real-time heatmaps

A GPU implementation is given for real-time visualization of aggregate eye movements (gaze) via heatmaps. Parallelization of the algorithm leads to substantial speedup over its CPU-based implementation and, for the first time, allows real-time rendering of heatmaps atop video. GLSL shader colorization allows the choice of color ramps. Several luminance-based color maps are advocated as alternatives to the popular rainbow color map, considered inappropriate (harmful) for depiction of (relative) gaze distributions.

Three different receptions of the same film

Audio description is nowadays increasingly popular. This is due to the rising social awareness of media accessibility along with the many European Union directives which make national broadcasters responsible for providing audiovisual programmes whose content has to be accessible to all. To date, little scientific research has been undertaken in this area, while two important facts are now a reality: the definition of guidelines and national standards, and the increasing practice of translation for audio description. These two trends call for scientific studies which, in turn, should provide data to be used in view of a possible harmonization of audio description standards throughout Europe. The idea of working towards a European common accessibility resource centre will mean a step forward towards ‘Media for All’2 to follow the EU directive ‘TV without Frontiers’. This article is the result of an empirical study investigating one of the many thorny issues in audio description: the reception of a film narrative by a given culture (Spanish), along with contrastive analyses with two other different cultures (US and Greek). The results which the article yields put into question the current bibliography on audio description, which has so far overlooked issues of perception across different cultures.

Three different receptions of the same film: ‘The Pear Stories Project’ applied to audio description1This article is part of the research project ‘Subtitling for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and Audio-Description: First Scientific Approaches and Their Application’ Ref: HUM2006-03653FILO, funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación.View all notes

Audio description is nowadays increasingly popular. This is due to the rising social awareness of media accessibility along with the many European Union directives which make national broadcasters responsible for providing audiovisual programmes whose content has to be accessible to all. To date, little scientific research has been undertaken in this area, while two important facts are now a reality: the definition of guidelines and national standards, and the increasing practice of translation for audio description. These two trends call for scientific studies which, in turn, should provide data to be used in view of a possible harmonization of audio description standards throughout Europe. The idea of working towards a European common accessibility resource centre will mean a step forward towards ‘Media for All’2 to follow the EU directive ‘TV without Frontiers’. This article is the result of an empirical study investigating one of the many thorny issues in audio description: the reception of a film narrative by a given culture (Spanish), along with contrastive analyses with two other different cultures (US and Greek). The results which the article yields put into question the current bibliography on audio description, which has so far overlooked issues of perception across different cultures.

A contrastive analysis of the main benchmarking tools for research assessment in translation and interpreting: the Spanish approach

Abstract Research assessment has become one of the most taxing exercises that scholars have to endure on a regular basis. Publications seem to be the currency used nowadays for everything from getting funds for a PhD, to access to an academic post and indeed promotion. Research assessment results are also of key importance in university departments, as funding and resources are increasingly linked to research results. In the Department of Translation and Interpreting at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona a pro-active policy has been adopted with the aim of increasing results from research activities at all levels. Within this context we gathered a list of T&I (Translation and Interpreting) journals and joined efforts with our colleagues in the Library of Humanities of our university, to include information about where these journals are indexed. Based on the collected data about T&I journals along with the existing assessment requirements made public by the various Catalan and Spanish quality agencies, we have analysed the objective parameters taken into consideration when evaluating research. When writing this article we had three main objectives: first, to gain a deeper understanding of the current research practices concerning publications within T&I; second, to carry out a bottom-up analysis and offer concrete data concerning average number of pages, average number of authors per article, author ordering and research output format and performance of scholars affiliated to Spanish universities in terms of high-impact contributions. Finally, we wanted to reflect upon the real-life application of the common assessment criteria.

Accessible Opera: Overcoming Linguistic and Sensorial Barriers

Abstract The desire to make media available for all has been rapidly accepted and implemented by most European countries. Opera, as one of the many audiovisual representations, also falls under the category of production which needs to be made accessible and this article aims to analyse how opera has gone through a complete transformation to become a cultural event for all, overcoming not only linguistic but also sensorial barriers. The first part of the article analyses the various forms of translation associated with opera and the main challenges they entail. The second presents different systems used to make opera accessible to the sensorially challenged, highlighting their main difficulties. Examples from research carried out at the Barcelonas Liceu opera house are presented to illustrate various modalities, especially audio description. All in all, it is our aim to show how translated-related processes have made it possible to open opera to a wider audience despite some initial reluctance.

Voice-over in Audiovisual Translation

Nowadays audiovisual translation (AVT) is a thriving field within Translation Studies. This is, however, a recent development. Although research in the audiovisual field dates back to 1932 (Franco and Orero, 2005), it remained in the realm of Film or Media Studies and it was only in the 1980s that it started to be studied from a translation perspective, within the discipline of Translation Studies. This transition from Film Studies to Translation Studies may account for the blurred terminology in use, the research guidelines and the somewhat unbalanced interest shown in the many modes within AVT. While subtitling and dubbing have been attracting interest in both research and teaching at university level, other techniques such as voice-over have been left aside or not clearly understood, as pointed out by Grigaraviciūtė? and Gottlieb (1999), Franco (2000), and Gambier (2003).

Audio Description with Audio Subtitling – an emergent modality of audiovisual localisation

Abstract Audio description (AD) has established itself as a media access service for blind and partially sighted people across a range of countries, for different media and types of audiovisual performance (e.g. film, TV, theatre, opera). In countries such as the UK and Spain, legislation has been implemented for the provision of AD on TV, and the European Parliament has requested that AD for digital TV be monitored in projects such as DTV4ALL (www.psp-dtv4all.org) in order to be able to develop adequate European accessibility policies. One of the drawbacks is that in their current form, AD services largely leave the visually impaired community excluded from access to foreign-language audiovisual products when they are subtitled rather than dubbed. To overcome this problem, audio subtitling (AST) has emerged as a solution. This article will characterise audio subtitling as a modality of audiovisual localisation which is positioned at the interface between subtitling, audio description and voice-over. It will argue that audio subtitles need to be delivered in combination with audio description and will analyse, systematise and exemplify the current practice of audio description with audio subtitling using commercially available DVDs.

Postgraduate Courses in Audiovisual Translation

Abstract Although postgraduate programmes in translation have been on offer at various universities for several decades now, there is still a significant shortage of courses dealing with specialized areas such as audiovisual translation. Until very recently, the only training available in this field was provided within the profession, away from the educational centres. However, some universities have now taken up the challenge of developing programmes in various types of audiovisual translation. This article profiles two pioneering postgraduate courses that have been successfully piloted and run at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Algorithm for discriminating aggregate gaze points: comparison with salient regions-of-interest

A novel method for distinguishing classes of viewers from their aggregated eye movements is described. The probabilistic framework accumulates uniformly sampled gaze as Gaussian point spread functions (heatmaps), and measures the distance of unclassified scanpaths to a previously classified set (or sets). A similarity measure is then computed over the scanpath durations. The approach is used to compare human observerss gaze over video to regions of interest (ROIs) automatically predicted by a computational saliency model. Results show consistent discrimination between human and artificial ROIs, regardless of either of two differing instructions given to human observers (free or tasked viewing).

Subtitle Synchronization across Multiple Screens and Devices

Ambient Intelligence is a new paradigm in which environments are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. This is having an increasing importance in multimedia applications, which frequently rely on sensors to provide useful information to the user. In this context, multimedia applications must adapt and personalize both content and interfaces in order to reach acceptable levels of context-specific quality of service for the user, and enable the content to be available anywhere and at any time. The next step is to make content available to everybody in order to overcome the existing access barriers to content for users with specific needs, or else to adapt to different platforms, hence making content fully usable and accessible. Appropriate access to video content, for instance, is not always possible due to the technical limitations of traditional video packaging, transmission and presentation. This restricts the flexibility of subtitles and audio-descriptions to be adapted to different devices, contexts and users. New Web standards built around HTML5 enable more featured applications with better adaptation and personalization facilities, and thus would seem more suitable for accessible AmI environments. This work presents a video subtitling system that enables the customization, adaptation and synchronization of subtitles across different devices and multiple screens. The benefits of HTML5 applications for building the solution are analyzed along with their current platform support. Moreover, examples of the use of the application in three different cases are presented. Finally, the user experience of the solution is evaluated.