As we enter our second year of Academic Licence Agreement with ZOO Digital and its cloud-based subtitling platform ZOOsubs (https://www.zoodigital.com/technology/zoosubs/ ) we look back at the activities this collaboration has enabled.
Following the signing of an Academic Licence Agreement in April 2021, the University of Vienna Centre for Translation Studies has been successfully integrating the cloud-based ZOOsubs platform (https://www.zoodigital.com/technology/zoosubs/) in its MA in Translation courses. Students enrolled in courses focussing on media localisation and accessibility have been carrying out tasks such as captioning, subtitling and audio description using ZOOsubs either in individual tasks or as part of collaborative team projects. In addition to familiarising themselves with typical subtitling workflows – Transcription, Spotting, Technical QA, Translation and Client Review – the platform has been enabling students to collaborate in a professional environment in revision or post-editing tasks, and employ translation quality assessment principles using the ZOO Issues typology and Comments functionalities. Therefore, access to ZOOsubs supported them in developing both creative, translation-related skills, as well as technical proficiency. Students enrolled in an Accessibility module were also able to use the platform to create collaboratively audio descriptions. Having access to the cloud-based ZOOsubs platform made the transition to online teaching during the pandemic particularly stress-free and offered both students and teachers a professional environment which could be easily accessed.
Alina Secară who implemented the Academic Partnership and firmly embeded ZOOsubs in her teaching at the ZTW, also collaborated with ZOO Digital professionals to co-present or run teacher training and student training sessions at various events, thus enabling colleagues and students from other universities to access the platform. Some of these events were the Übersetzen und Technologien Workshop organized by the European Commission representation in Austria, the University of Vienna, the University of Graz, the University of Innsbruck and UNIVERSITAS Austria on Hieronymus Day in 2021, The Translating Europe Workshop From Translation to Accessibility EMT Train the Trainer Summer School (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxryO9U_B-4 ) and the Workshop on Subtitling at the Nitra Summer School on Audiovisual Translation: Translation, Technology and Inclusion Summer School (https://tinyurl.com/4uzjpr2k ) both held in June 2021.
We would like to thank ZOO Digital and we look forward to continuing our collaboration!
