On completion of this training sequence,
you will be able to discipline yourself to practice and improve skills,
like gathering information and finding shortcuts and shortforms.
This is the agenda of this presentation.
I will first look at how to gather information,
to then move to creating shortcuts and shortforms.
When providing a professional intralingual subtitling service,
it is very important that words, names and acronyms are spelled correctly.
Therefore you should prepare in the best way possible.
The first step is to get the agenda or schedule of a meeting.
Not only will this show which topic is being presented or discussed,
but also you can copy the correct spelling of the names of the speakers.
In some cases you can also receive a list of names from the participants.
For example, this is relevant in a meeting,
or for an association.
In case there is a roll call,
it is also important to have this list beforehand.
When presenters are going to read a speech from paper,
it is of course very good to have this speech beforehand.
You can either have this on paper beside you,
and you can read it and respeak,
or you can have it digitally played out.
For example, if you use some tools, like Text on Top,
these will allow you to show the text,
instead of having to respeak it.
Secondly, it is good to have the PowerPoint file available beforehand.
From these PowerPoints you can also extract the jargon,
specific words used during the meeting,
but also other names and acronyms, such as those of the affilations of speakers.
In addition, it is good to see if this event has taken place before,
and if you can find information online about it.
If not, try to do research in similar events on the topic.
When working in an educational setting, or in a workplace,
most of the time,
the service is being provided to only one person with a hearing impairment.
As preparation for these meetings,
it is very helpful if you get more information
about the content of the lessons or of the meeting, beforehand.
In case of education,
it is usually not so relevant to indicate who is speaking.
Usually, this will be the teacher or the professor,
and his or her name is well known to participants.
When questions or comments come from the students or audience,
this can be indicated.
But this can be a big challenge,
unless you use a platform
that already says who this person who is speaking is.
In case of a business meeting, for example, around a table,
an overview of the people sitting around this table can help.
That way, in case of a discussion or quick change of speakers,
the speaker can be indicated.
So that way, it is clear who says what.
Again, it is good to do research
on the topic of the lesson or of the meeting beforehand to be prepared.
When working more often in certain settings,
of course you will get more experience about the topic
and build up a dictionary or glossary of the words that are most commonly used.
For tv subtitling we will only look at live and semi live programs.
Preprepared subtitling is out of the scope.
With semi live programs,
you are able to receive texts or videos beforehand.
So prepare a number of possible subtitles,
which can be played out during broadcast.
These could be, for example, short videos of interviews,
but also the autocue text of the newsreader, or scripts,
which you can use to prepare subtitles.
From these videos and texts, you can also collect names and words
that might be used in the live parts of the broadcast.
For sports programs, research can be done about the specific sport itself.
It is important to know how to spell certain vocabulary
used in that type of sport.
Of course the spelling of the people mentioned is very important.
For news programs, it is important to keep up to date with the current topics.
Names and words can easily be researched.
Make sure you use the same spelling as your subtitling colleagues.
For example, using a whiteboard in the subtitling department,
showing the current topics and spelling of names, is very, very useful.
And as for talkshows,
it is good to find out which people will participate in the show
and do a bit of research about their background.
When working as a parliamentary respeaker,
you are normally working for the same people that is the members of the parliament.
These names and the names of their parties, must be in the software vocabulary
for the whole duration of the legislature.
On top of them, you should also add the names of people
who work together with the parliament,
like ministers, the head of state and the like.
For each session you always have an agenda.
The agenda contains the topics that are going to be discussed.
Normally, it is a law to be discussed and voted,
or the question time with the government.
Besides the agenda you always have preparation material,
like proposals, a previous parliamentary report,
the summary report or other annexes.
Some software programs allow you to feed them with digital documents,
and they automatically spot the ones that are not present in the vocabulary.
In case your software does not, you can always do it manually.
When preparing the software for a conference,
the respeaker has different tools available.
The most common one is to insert new words to the vocabulary.
This is very useful when it comes to technical terms,
or other words that are not in the software vocabulary,
like proper names,
or affiliations,
or other similar words.
In the case of a name and a surname,
I recommend to insert both together,
as one item,
to avoid that names that sound like common words
like Barry White,
appear in lowercase.
Some software program also allow you to add specific subvocabularies.
Subvocabularies are very useful for conference subtitlers,
who must subtitle a different topic each time.
When some words are too similar to existing ones,
and you fear they are not going to be correctly recognized by the machine,
you can always use macros.
A macro is a word that you pronounce in a different way,
to be sure it is correctly recognized.
For example, pretend you have to subtitle the CEO of a company
whose name is 4U,
spelled in two characters: the number 4 and the letter U.
In this case you can add a macro to the machine vocabulary,
and associate the name of this company to a spoken input
that says "MACROFORYOU".
Each time you want the name of the company to appear on the screen correctly spelled,
you only need to say "MACROFORYOU".
to have it correctly spelled on the screen.
You can also use macros for long formulas that are often used.
For example, if want to say "Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II",
you can create a macro, called macroqueen,
and have the whole title appear correctly spelled.
Similar to a macro is the housestyle.
A housestyle is the way our client wants a word to appear on screen.
In this case, there are not alternative spellings.
Only a spelling that differs to a standard one.
This is the case of those compound words that require a hyphen.
By the time the hyphen normally disappears,
but for a while the two spellings coexist.
If a client wants one of these two spellings,
then you go for that.
And you can change the word in the software vocabulary
to suite the client's needs.
Finally, if you don’t manage to have a word recognized as it should be
because it is too difficult to pronounce,
you can always think of personalizing the pronunciation
by changing the spoken form the written form of that word is associated to.
In this videolecture we have seen some pre-editing strategies,
or strategies to be applied before a speech takes place.
In particular, to avoid and reduce mistakes during the subtitling job,
we have seen how to collect terminological information for each context.
A tv program, a conference speech,
a parliamentary session, a meeting or a school class.
Then, we have also seen how to create shortforms and shortcuts in general.