PODCAST | Francesca Raffi interviews Agnieszka Szarkowska, for FRED’s periodical programme on media accessibility.

To listen to the interview, click on the ► icon on the right, just above the picture

Agnieszka Szarkowska is Associate Professor in the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw. She is the head of AVT Lab, one of the first research groups on audiovisual translation. Agnieszka is a researcher, academic teacher, ex-translator, translator trainer, and media accessibility consultant. Between 2016 and 2018 she was Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Centre for Translation Studies, University College London, working on the project “Exploring Subtitle Reading with Eye Tracking Technology” funded by the European Commission. Her areas of expertise include audiovisual translation, media accessibility and translator training. She has participated in many research projects, including eye tracking studies on subtitling, audio description in education, text-to-speech audio description, multilingualism in subtitling for the deaf and the hard of hearing, respeaking, and modern art for all. Agnieszka is the Vice-President of the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (ESIST), a member of European Society for Translation Studies (EST), Galician Observatory for Media Accessibility (GALMA), Intermedia Research Group, AKCES expert group and an honorary member of the Polish Audiovisual Translators Association (STAW).

The 8th Media for All International Conference was held at Stockholm University on June 17–19, 2019. The conference attracted academics, researchers, language practitioners, translators, interpreters, broadcasters, government agencies, support groups and the audiovisual translation (AVT) and media accessibility (MA) industry, not only from Europe, but indeed from all over the world. As Agnieszka Szarkowska says in the interview, the field of media accessibility is becoming ever more complex and users more aware of what they want in terms of media accessibility services, thus demanding their just rights as audiovisual citizens in terms of both quantity and quality. This is also the reason why a Round Table on AVT localization was organised at the Media For All conference where professionals and academics, as Agnieszka says in the interview, discussed some of the most “hot topics” in media accessibility.

To discover more about INTERMEDIA Conference, click here.