Anna Matamala – EASIT Project

PODCAST | Annalisa Sandrelli interviews Anna Matamala, for FRED’s periodical programme on media accessibility.

Anna Matamala, BA in Translation (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and PhD in Applied Linguistics (Universitat Pompeu Fabria, Barcelona), is an associate professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Barcelona), where she teaches audiovisual translation. She worked as an audiovisual translator for more than ten years for the Catalan television TVC. She has participated (DTV4ALL, ADLAB, HBB4ALL) and led (AVT-LP, ALST, VIW) funded projects on audiovisual translation and media accessibility. She currently leads TransMedia Catalonia research group, she is currently leading the national project NEA and the European project EASIT, and is involved in the European projects ADLAB PRO and ImAc. She has taken an active role in the organisation of scientific events such as the Media for All conference or the Advanced Research Audio Description Seminar ARSAD, and has published extensively in international refereed journals such as Meta, The Translator, Perspectives, Babel, Translation Studies, among others. She is the author of a book on interjections and lexicography (IEC, 2005), co-author (with Eliana Franco and Pilar Orero) of a book on voice-over (Peter Lang, 2010), and co-editor of various volumes on audiovisual translation and media accessibility. Joan Coromines Prize in 2005, and APOSTA Award to Young Researchers in 2011. Her research interests are audiovisual translation, media accessibility and applied linguistics. She is currently involved in standardisation work at ISO.

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. Anna Matamala’s presentation at the conference, together with Rocío Bernabé Caro (Deputy Head of the Professional College of Translation and Interpreting of the SDI München and lecturer at the SDI University of Applied Languages), offers an overview of the European project EASIT and presents the results of the first two project phases. As Anna says in the interview, the aim of the project is to define the skills of the professional (or professionals) involved in creating easy-to-understand content, with an emphasis on how already existing professionals such as audio describers or subtitlers could expand their skills to cater for innovative hybrid contexts in audiovisual media.

To discover more about Media For All Conference, click here.