SysMedia brings WinCAPS live subtitling to Portuguese polytechnic

SysMedia, a leading specialist in subtitling solutions, content management and production systems for interactive television and teletext, has secured a contract with the Portuguese polytechnic ESTG Leiria to supply WinCAPS live subtitling.
The polytechnic runs a wide variety of undergraduate degree courses, from Engineering and Management Studies through to Translation & Interpreting. As part of its Translation & Interpreting degree ESTG Leiria offers a module entitled ‘Translation Technology’, which concentrates mainly on subtitling.
Currently no broadcaster in Portugal provides live subtitles. However, Portuguese television broadcasters have recently become aware of the needs of deaf and hard of hearing audiences and ESTG Leiria anticipates that it is likely that live subtitling will become a broadcasting reality shortly.
Joselia Neves, a lecturer in Audiovisual Translation at ESTG Leiria, said: "We believe that RTP and other Portuguese broadcasters are very, very close to adopting live subtitling. Hopefully, when they are ready to go, we will have already trained our students for the job. As a technical polytechnic, we try to provide our students with as much hand-on practice as possible and we thought that it would make sense to train them on the equipment that is to be used by our broadcasters."
WinCAPS, which offers unrivalled capabilities for the real-time subtitling of live content and allows for the combining of pre-scripted material with real-time keyboard entry, is currently being installed at ESTG Leiria and SysMedia will provide staff training. The introduction of live subtitling as part of the syllabus is scheduled for February 2005, with students to benefit from 45 hours of in-class training. They will then be given a project to complete, which will take another 45 hours. Neves believes that after nearly 100 hours of training, students will be ready for the market.
While the course will concentrate on the subtitling of live news broadcasts, it will not do so exclusively, and students will be involved in the subtitling of regional live events - sports, for example - and of conference presentations, as part of their practical training experience.
(GB)