Study title

The recent global surge in audiovisual content has emphasised the importance of accessibility for wider audiences. The Shaping Multilingual Access through Respeaking Technology (SMART) project addressed this by exploring interlingual respeaking, a novel practice combining speech recognition technology with human interpreting and subtitling skills to produce real-time speech-to-text services across languages. This method evolved from intralingual respeaking, which is widely used in broadcasting to create live subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Interlingual respeaking, which involves translating live content into another language and subtitling it, could revolutionise subtitle production for foreign-language content, overcoming sensory and language barriers. Interlingual respeaking involves two shifts: interlingual (from one language to another) and intermodal (from spoken to written). This practice combines the challenges of simultaneous interpreting with the requirements of subtitling. Respeakers must accurately convey messages in another language to a speech recognition system, adding punctuation and making real-time edits for clarity and readability. This method leverages speech recognition technology and human translation skills to ensure efficient and high-quality translated subtitles. Interlingual respeaking offers immense potential for making multilingual content accessible to international and hearing-impaired audiences. It is particularly relevant for television, conferences, and live events. However, research into this practice is still in its early stages. The SMART project's main goals were to study interlingual respeaking's complexity, focusing on the acquisition and implementation of relevant skills (not only procedural, but also cognitive and interpersonal ones), and the accuracy of the final subtitles. The research involved fifty-one language professionals with backgrounds in relevant language-related practices (namely interpreting,...