PODCAST | Francesca Raffi interviews Jan Pedersen, for FRED’s periodical programme on media accessibility.
Jan Pedersen is Associate Professor in Translation Studies, Director of The Institute for Interpreting and Translation Studies, and Deputy Head of the Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism at Stockholm University. He used to work as a TV subtitler for many years. These days, he mainly teaches in audiovisual translation and subtitling, but he has over the years taught in diverse fields; mainly translation, but also linguistics and English, at all levels. His main field of research is audiovisual translation, and he specialises in subtitling studies. His first large-scale project was Scandinavian Subtitles, which was a study of the norms that govern Swedish, Danish and Norwegian subtitles from a technical and cultural perspective. He is currently running a project called Visualized Metaphors in Subtitling, which investigates how figures of speech are rendered in subtitled media. He is also carrying out research on Swedish subtitles produced by amateurs in the project Swedish Fansubs. He ha recently joined the editorial board of Journal of Audiovisual Translation (the first international journal dedicated to audiovisual translation studies published by European Association for Studies in Screen Translation).
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. The aim, as Jan Pedersen says in the interview, was to create and mediate understanding in an increasingly complex mediascape. Understanding not only of audiovisual content, but also understanding of and between producers, consumers and prosumers, understanding for the technical and cognitive processes involved, understanding for consumers’ needs and desires, and understanding of and for working conditions, among many other perspectives.
To discover more about Media For All Conference, click here.