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onA.I.R. Conference of Presentation September 12, 2012
Chamber of Deputies Palazzo Marini, Rome
Good evening.
Let's start this conference.
We've had a technical problem I will briefly explain.
Erika is a professional subtitler.
She works with a desktop computer
for television.
She has been invited here to this conference.
She came with a laptop where she transferred all her data.
Three metres away from the entrance
of the Sala delle Colonne
she had an accident.
Her computer broke.
Fortunately, however,
as we are a respeaking association,
we had another computer
with the speech recognition software.
We re-created the so-called "vocal profile" from scratch.
It is the instrument used by a professional respeaker.
A professional's vocal profile is quite large, 2 to 5 Gb,
because it contains all the data
collected during one's career.
The profile Erika is using right now is blank.
She had the courage
or maybe the recklessness
to come and offer her services anyway.
The quality will likely be much lower
than what is usually seen on TV.
I really wanted to give you this technical introduction
as Director of human resources of the Association.
I now give the floor to our President who will chair this conference.
Good evening, everybody.
I'd like to introduce myself. I am Francesca Marchionne,
President of the Association onA.I.R., International Association on Respeaking.
According to the programme, MP Marco Beltrandi should have been here.
He had, however, a voting session at 4 p.m.
He assured us he would come as soon as the session is over.
In the meantime, he really wanted you to know
that subtitling for the deaf is a cause he feels strongly about.
He sends his regards.
If he comes later he'll tell you in person,
and he will thank you for being here today.
Now I'll give the floor to another MP, Mario Mauro.
He sent us a video message we will show you right away.
It is subtitled, so there will be no problems.
We will disable the respoken subtitles, so you can see his video message.
Dear friends, good afternoon.
I thank President Francesca Marchionne and Mr. Giuliano Pirelli
for inviting me to the presentation of the Association onA.I.R.
I want to say how sorry I am that I cannot attend the conference in Rome.
I am tied up in Strasbourg for the plenary session of the European Parliament.
I warmly greet the distinguished speakers and all the people present,
who support, like I do, an innovative and concrete initiative
in favour of a large part of the community of disadvantaged people in Italy.
I am certain that the spread of respeaking
will enormously foster the social inclusion of hearing-impaired people.
In my opinion, it is an innovative method
favouring immigrants' social inclusion as well.
Until now the radio was reserved only for hearing people.
Now it's accessible to deaf and foreigners who have communication problems.
This is due to the superb intertwining of technology, research and solidarity.
The European project will come true the more room we give
to initiatives like the one presented today.
The growth and sustainability of our system
will depend on the room we will grant to free initiative, entrepreneurship,
non-profit sector and creativity of associations and individual citizens.
We need to revive social solidarity.
We will have progress and welfare, if the government of Europe
will be based on the respect of everyone's dignity and on the help
offered by social groups to family and to challenged people.
We only need few basic, universal rules
for institutions which shall be able to enhance all of society's energies
and serve as controllers, not as rulers of the lives of the citizens.
In order for associations like yours to deeply penetrate
the core of the system and of society, we need subsidiarity.
More society is good for the State. More society is good for the institutions.
More society is good for the people's subsidiary model of the European Union.
The real shift will occur when we'll start betting on the individual,
not because this serves a social or political project,
but to bring forth innovations as well as positive economic and social changes.
Initiatives like onA.I.R., the projects Voice and OltreSuoni
are examples pointing in the right direction.
As we saw and heard,
Italy is not alone in focussing on subtitling.
At European level as well,
or better yet, above all at European level,
people are addressing this subject matter.
MEP Mario Mauro and MP Beltrandi
feel especially close to this cause.
This is why both of them agreed
to take part in this conference in their own way.
We especially have to thank Mr. Beltrandi for this room
as well as parliamentary assistant Alessandro Massari.
Both are members of the party Radicali Italiani.
They worked together with our press officer,
who couldn't be here today, because he lives in Sardinia, Michele Demontis.
Well.
I'd like to continue the presentation of the Association.
As manifest from the name, International Association on Respeaking,
we mainly deal with respeaking,
but also with recorded subtitles.
I want to say immediately that we are no trade association.
We are no association of respeakers. There are respeakers,
but also other people, simple scholars.
There are deaf people, like Giacomo Pirelli.
There are professionals, students,
trainees who have decided
to work as respeakers in the future.
We therefore do not speak only about respeakers.
As you can see in the poster, the image we chose for today's conference
is a parrot with a microphone.
Those who know what we talk about and know what respeaking is
have no trouble imagining what it represents.
Parrots repeat. Respeakers don't repeat faithfully, word for word,
but they tend to transform spoken words into writing
by dictating to a speech recognition software.
As we are a little late
and I don't want the conference to continue till 8 p.m.,
I immediately give the floor to our Vice-President, Tiziana Trapani.
She is sitting here, on my left.
She will present our projects and ideas
to further develop our Association. Thank you.
Thank you. Can you hear me ?
Thank you. "Ideas often light each other"
"like electric sparks".
Friedrich Engels said these words in the XIX century.
He was a German economist, philosopher and politician.
If we think about it, we realize
that ideas are nothing but creative energy
originating directly in our minds.
Ideas feed on the creative energy of other elements,
thus creating an endless process which has led humanity to progress.
Unfortunately, present times tend to stifle this energy
by means of disenchantment and distrust of the future.
Economic crisis, job uncertainty, disinformation from the media,
distrust of values. All this creates a bubble of negativity.
It inhibits the creative energy of younger minds.
I think this is the reason why six months ago
onA.I.R., International Association on Respeaking, was founded:
we couldn't allow ideas developed by chance,
in the daily life and experience of each of us,
to get lost in the gloom of modern times.
On the contrary, we wanted ideas to light each other.
Our first project, OltreSuoni,
will be presented in detail by Dr Eugeni.
It is somehow our first effort
to turn an empirical idea into a practical application.
It is useful for two categories of people experiencing communication challenges:
the deaf for sensory reasons and the immigrants for language reasons.
OltreSuoni is by no means our final destination.
It is our starting point.
It is an experiment enabling us
to point out all practical and technical problems
and to improve thus the initial idea.
Then we can broaden its scope
and involve communities all over Italy and abroad
with the project "Radio Text, by reading we listen to the radio, too".
Its aim is the same, but its scope is broader.
Some members of onA.I.R. are professional translators and interpreters.
They work with different language pairs.
They thus enable the Association
to face innovative challenges as well,
such as real-time interlingual subtitling via respeaking.
My colleague Francesca carried out an experiment
in her masters thesis.
She demonstrated that a professional respeaker
who masters a foreign language as well as simultaneous interpreting techniques
can subtitle a television programme in real time
from a source language, French in the specific experiment,
to a target language, Italian.
Obviously adequate training and background are necessary.
Respeaking is already complex at an intralingual level,
i.e. when the transfer from speech to writing occurs in the same language.
The simultaneous translation occurring in the brain of an interlingual respeaker
represents an additional difficulty, but the potential is extraordinary.
In the era of globalization and multimedia interactivity
it would be inconceivable to deny sensorially disadvantaged people
access to live TV broadcasts
or events of remarkable cultural importance.
Integration is the result of a series of social and cultural processes
making every single one of us part of a society.
But if any of us has no access to all these processes,
how can they really feel like they are part of their society ?
Obviously in this case the term "society"
doesn't only include the members of the local linguistic community.
It is to be understood in a broader sense as human society.
We must grant access in real time
to internationally relevant television programmes,
such as the speeches of major foreign presidents.
This way both language and disability barriers can be torn down at the same time.
This is the double aim
of another project onA.I.R. is working on.
It is called PALiOSS.
It's the Italian acronym for Platform for the Accessibility
to Oral Language for the Deaf and Foreigners.
The project is still in embryo.
According to it, a platform accessible online will be created
so that deaf people and foreigners can turn to it
to request various kinds of services:
from simultaneous interpreting to real-time subtitling.
It will be like always being able to use the services
of one's personal respeaker or translator all over Europe and the world.
onA.I.R. is built around its members' ideas,
around the direct observation of events in daily life
and around the search for solutions which can guarantee
the inclusion of every citizen with no discrimination.
With Mr. Pirelli's permission, I'd like to quote Simonetta Iacopi's email.
Simonetta comes from Bologna and has been deaf since she was 3 years old.
Simonetta wrote to Mr. Pirelli, who immediately alerted us,
about the usefulness of a software which would simultaneously transcribe a call
on a computer connected to a mobile or fixed phone
without previous training of the speaker's voice.
On one hand, speaker-dependent software
ensures a higher accuracy than speaker-independent software,
but, as we've seen today, it has the drawback
of having to be trained by creating a vocal profile.
With phone calls it is difficult or even impossible
to create a vocal profile for each contact.
It is doubtless an interesting topic
to which we will be happy and honoured to give our small contribution.
In the fields of research, development and experimentation we will cooperate
with the team of the project Voice, who is already working on it, I think.
An interesting project could take place in high schools
providing a specific social, psychological and pedagogic education.
We could foster activities promoting respeaking
as a form of inclusion of sensorially challenged people.
In this regard we are in touch
with the high school in social studies of Città Sant'Angelo.
It lies in the province of Pescara and it's my town.
In these first months of life of onA.I.R.
we try to focus on what is closer to the members of the Association.
Then we will broaden our scope.
We are like a small stone thrown into a lake
creating concentric circles in the water which become larger and larger.
We also started to cooperate with Veronica Cocco,
who works as a researcher in the Psychology Department of the University of Cagliari,
for the subtitling of university lectures.
Before giving the floor to Dr Eugeni,
I would like to quote the writer Lev Tolstoj:
Maybe in our own small way, thanks to the simplicity of our ideas,
to the conviction and enthusiasm with which we try to accomplish them,
we can give birth to great innovations
to improve the lives of many people who often are not given much consideration.
Thank you.
Thank you, Tiziana.
Tiziana is a professional editor.
Like many young people in Italy, she is unemployed right now.
In her masters thesis she dealt with respeaking,
especially respeaking in Italian and French television.
She compared the two systems.
We now give the floor to Dr Carlo Eugeni.
I am sure many of you know him already.
I'd like to briefly introduce him anyway.
He has always devoted himself to respeaking.
He began studying it
with a focus on translation, professional and didactic approach in 2005.
Back then there were no academic studies on this subject,
either in Italy or abroad.
He devoted himself to respeaking
with various articles published all around the world and two books.
In the didactic field for six years he taught
multimedial translation and French interpreting at the University of Macerata.
Right now he is coordinator and teacher of the module Subtitling for the Deaf of
the European Online Masters in Audiovisual Translation of the University of Parma.
From a professional point of view, he is a TV conference respeaker
as well as a respeaker trainer for major companies in this field.
He already mentioned his role in our Association.
He is responsible for human resources.
This is one of the things he takes care of.
He will tell us more about our major project:
OltreSuoni. I give you the floor.
I would have written irresponsible of human resources
considering the serious technical problem we had earlier !
Good afternoon, everyone.
In these five to ten minutes I will talk about the project OltreSuoni
for which I am in charge of the scientific committee.
As it is my idea, the President lets me talk about it.
The slogan of our Association...
I can't say it out loud, otherwise someone up there will get angry.
The slogan is in Latin and comes from the Exodus.
It is very challenging, but it shows us the right path.
Our slogan is:
"Tu loqueris omnia quae mando tibi;"
"et Aharon loquetur ad Pharaonem".
This is God talking to Moses:
"You will say everything I tell you".
Then Moses' reply follows:
"Yes, but I stutter and I'm too embarrassed to speak in public"
"and I can't reach everyone".
So God replies: "Ok, then your brother Aaron will talk to the Pharaoh".
This is how the role of the meturgeman was created.
It is part of the Jewish culture.
It is the person who speaks repeating what the master says.
Some of my colleagues consider this to be the first form of respeaking
with no speech recognition software, obviously.
From a professional perspective, the meturgeman is seen like this,
because he repeats what the master says.
I've already said too much about theoretical things.
But in my opinion they give an idea of what we want to accomplish.
We started the "Project OltreSuoni"
to tear down a communication barrier
which seemed completely insurmountable for the deaf:
the radio.
The radio is an instrument
which, by its own nature, is not accessible to the deaf.
It is an entirely oral means of communication.
With the appearance of web radios,
we were struck by this idea, together with a web radio from Cagliari.
Its name is RadioXCaso.
Now it has been absorbed by Unica Radio, the radio of the University of Cagliari.
The idea is to transmit subtitles in real time
about what the speaker is saying during a specific feature.
We do not subtitle songs broadcasted via radio.
We subtitle specific features of global significance.
We already did two pilot instalments.
We saw what the difficulties are.
We tested the various technical tools.
It's about...
It's about subtitling features we first analyse with the speaker.
As we are still in the scientific phase,
we have the luxury of studying the content with the speaker.
Then we subtitle it in real time thanks to a software
which Synthema, a software house from Pisa, made available for us online.
Thanks to this instrument, we subtitle and correct online
the text the speaker reads in real time.
There is also a chat feature.
It allows those
who read the subtitles
to interact with the speaker and the respeaker.
It is a complete, all-inclusive form of communication.
It enables the user to communicate.
Users are not necessarily deaf, they can be foreigners, too.
Or maybe they want to use this new form of communication for other reasons.
They can communicate directly with the speaker.
I subtitled the first instalment.
It was about the Italian constitution.
It was met with little interest.
The second instalment was about the European Football Championship.
We saw a much larger interest there.
From now on I will no longer take care of the subtitling.
I will keep following the scientific part for the preparation of the questionnaires
which the users of the service will receive, as happened twice already.
What is the questionnaire for ?
If subtitles are offered and the users are asked if they were good or not
and the users say they were amazing,
as person in charge of the scientific committee
I don't know whether that service was useful in a communicative perspective.
We therefore prepare a questionnaire
to test the comprehension of the subtitles in the users.
We also test the level of comprehension in people with normal hearing
in order to have a reference for comparison.
In this way we understand if the subtitles were useful.
Then we analyse the reasons why the subtitles were useful or not.
We have repeated this project with Radio Text.
It deals roughly with the same things but extends the scope.
I think that the first time a radio programme is subtitled is extraordinary.
I repeat it and am proud of it, I actually brag about it,
and rightly so, in my opinion.
This project wants to offer access
to ten million people,
including deaf Italians, foreigners with limited language skills
and Italians with a relapse into illiteracy.
It grants 10-12 million people access
to contents which were previously unavailable at least to deaf people.
From the point of view of communication, it is a revolution,
like the internet or similar.
We obviously don't expect it to be as successful.
But we hope that in the daily life of deaf people
it can offer a new means of communication which was not accessible in the past.
I'll stop here.
If you have any question, there will be a Q&A session in the end.
Thank you.
Thank you, Carlo.
I'm sure this speech has inspired some of you
thanks to the originality of the project.
Before we proceed with the next speaker,
I'd like to add that the Association onA.I.R. is fairly new.
It was founded in March this year.
Thanks also to our Director of Human Resources,
within a short time it has already reached 50 members.
It has an important project en route, OltreSuoni.
It has many more projects, as Tiziana said earlier,
which will be developed soon.
Some of its members come from a field
which is close to respeaking.
One of our members will talk about this now.
I am really thrilled to give the floor to Francesco Cellini.
First of all, Cellini is an experienced transcriber typist.
A few months ago he became a sworn respeaker
for various Italian courts for which he works as a consultant.
Why did I say I am really thrilled ?
There's very good reason.
Francesco Cellini is for respeaking
what Saulo is for Christianity.
Originally Francesco did not support respeaking.
Later on, though, thanks to the continuous positive prodding
of his colleague and friend Rossella D'Arcangelo
and then to the patient scientific debate with Dr Eugeni,
he wised up.
He saw the huge potential of respeaking,
even for what had been for years, and still is, his career.
He then stepped up to the plate
and patiently began his self-training.
He reached excellent results.
Today he is the living proof of respeaking practice.
As a professional in minuting opening up to respeaking,
I give the floor to Francesco Cellini.
Thank you, Madame President.
I feel emotional after this introduction. I'll try to calm down.
You said almost everything and left little for me to say.
But I want to say something, as it is an honour to be here.
Asking me to talk about report writing, transcribing, stenotyping
and lately even respeaking is meat and drink to me.
This theme is dear to me thanks to my professional career,
but also due to many battles
I fought for the recognition of our professions,
which unfortunately haven't been recognized yet.
It's been twenty years
since I entered this world, which I still consider fascinating.
I am aware that much is still to be explored and learnt.
As Francesca said, I've been asked to talk about
"The world of report writing approaches respeaking".
An introduction is necessary.
When we talk about report writing,
I immediately think of the methods which are still used:
stenotyping, transcribing by means of typewriting,
shorthanding and now also respeaking and automatic transcription.
If we want to focus instead on the world of report writing,
we think of the various roles:
report writers at the Parliament,
those who work at the Chamber or at the Senate,
meeting report writers working for town, province or regional councils,
for bank councils, notary offices, conferences and conventions.
As soon as we hear "report writers"
we immediately think of court reporters,
who are still employed in judicial settings:
courts, public prosecutor's offices, law firms, municipal judges.
Some figures. Carlo often asks me:
How many report writers are there in Italy ?
It is necessary to say first that 90% of the current workforce in Italy
have spent at least one day in court or written the report of a court hearing.
It might seem odd, but there are no official or even rough figures
regarding the number of report writers in the judicial field.
Why ?
Because, as I said earlier, ours is not a recognized category.
As we are not recognized, we have no professional register.
We can infer a number.
It refers to the last call for bids of the Ministry of Justice.
The previous call for bids requested 1,200 operators at national level.
Careful ! It says operators.
Even the Ministry is aware that our professional role doesn't exist.
It says neither stenotypists nor respeakers.
It doesn't say typists. It says operators.
There is no category, no professional register.
It is thus obvious that companies can enrol just about anyone.
There could be 3,000 of us, there could be 5,000.
There could be even less than the 1,200 requested by the Ministry.
As Francesca said earlier,
I am a sworn transcriber in the law field, also for courts.
I approached this world
thanks to the foresight and above all the stubbornness to get me close to it,
to make me learn new technologies.
Above all I wanted to improve my professional skills,
to update them, to modernize them and to reskill myself.
Nowadays skilled transcribers and stenotypists
must seriously update report writing techniques.
Especially respeaking is a method to transcribe speech in real time
which will surpass all the existing techniques,
such as stenotyping, transcribing by means of typewriting.
Allow me a simple observation.
Let's think of a keyboard operator working on a transcription for 8 consecutive hours.
The following day he'll do the same again.
Let's think of a stenotypist who has this tiresome task
and must also take care of the maintenance of the stenotyping machines.
In Italy it's getting more and more difficult to find stenotyping instruments,
because only few companies work in this field.
Well, based on my own experience, respeaking
really is a more flexible and simpler method.
The only necessary ingredients are a good PC,
an operator with a good voice and a clear pronunciation, a microphone.
Obviously also a vast experience, a good cultural and professional background.
This is essential, in my opinion.
In my personal experience, sometime ago a software programme was introduced to me.
In the judicial field it was called "Mario".
This software was fashionable.
It transcribed a text by means of vocal dictation, in the judicial field.
My first reaction was dubious, as Francesca mentioned earlier.
I was sure that professionalism with a machine,
with a keyboard, with a stenotyping machine was unbeatable.
My scepticism also rooted in fear,
fear of losing in an instant twenty years of professionalism.
I could already envisage my keyboard being superannuated.
I was afraid of having to change career.
This fear is shared by many colleagues who also write to me privately.
They are afraid their professionalism might dissolve in an instant,
because for them progress means respeaking.
For them respeaking means losing what they've built over the years.
After the first difficult impact, as Francesca said,
I personally see no catastrophe looming ahead.
The approach towards progress is wrong.
If we don't accept progress, it will overcome us.
If we don't accept it, who comes after us will profit from it all.
I have to thank Rossella D'Arcangelo, who introduced me to Carlo Eugeni.
Thanks also to Giacomo Pirelli.
They made this union with respeaking possible.
Dragon had been the topic of discussion for a while in forums and on Facebook.
I don't mean to advertise it, but it's what people talked about.
This software was considered incompatible with our job.
Then I had the luck to try it, to install a trial version.
And to my own astonishment I realized
that I had transcribed twenty minutes of a town council with very few mistakes.
That was my first time.
Put briefly: we must understand that progress goes on, it doesn't stop.
In the year 2000 the Chamber of Deputies abolished stenography.
Since then automatic recording has been tested.
In the last call for bids
the Ministry of Justice mentioned experimental automatic recording
together with traditional methods of transcription,
such as stenotyping and audio recording.
The path is traced.
I'm almost done, don't worry.
This year onA.I.R. gave the first certificates
because some of us did something.
We wanted to become something
which could actually show what progress is about.
We decided to retrain with a course we attended in Rome.
This course was self-managed.
Carlo Eugeni was very enthusiastic.
On July 22, I was one of the first Italian report writers
who proudly received the certificate in
"Training in real-time report writing by means of respeaking".
We started from the basics:
from correct breathing and good pronunciation to speech transcription.
It was a great experience, an opportunity for professional growth.
Above all we saw it as a spur to explore new paths in the future.
I end here with the reply President Francesca Marchionne
gave in an interview of our online magazine.
I manage it with my colleague Ms. D'Arcangelo, "Resocontinforma".
The President said:
"Respeaking is a writing technique, like stenotyping and typewriting."
"Like stenotyping, but unlike typewriting,"
"it is a quick writing technique."
"It is self-evident that, if there is no need for quick writing,"
"such as for expert evidences, minutes"
"or reports which do not need to be handed in immediately,"
"the three techniques compete against each other".
"The most flexible and economic one will prevail".
Thanks to Francesco Cellini, also for quoting me.
- Well, undoubtedly... - May I say something ?
For a lot of people working in this field Cellini was the boogieman
for any kind of change.
There were even jokes about this: "Careful, I'll call Cellini !", we said.
Because at first he was a fearful opponent,
a detractor of respeaking. Obviously it was a form of defence.
A lot of his colleagues still use this form of defence.
I was almost moved when he said he was proud of receiving
the first certificate of training in respeaking in his field.
Basically it was not a course
which transformed him from law student to lawyer.
It was essentially a psychological goal.
It made it possible for at least...
There were quite a few of you, there were ten of you.
It made it possible for at least ten people
to move from an attitude opposed to respeaking
to a position in which they just seized the opportunity and said:
"Why shouldn't we try ?"
"At the worst it's one more tool which can enrich us".
And that's the way it was, as he stated clearly.
I hope you'll excuse me, but I really wanted to say this.
Good. Now we can proceed with the next speech.
Giovanni Polidoro, law expert.
He will talk about accessibility,
mainly from a legislative point of view.
The floor is yours, Giovanni.
Hello ?
Good evening, everyone.
I was actually invited last minute by Dr Carlo Eugeni
to talk about accessibility to mass media,
basically radio and television.
The norms to be found in this regard
in our body of law
refer to the Legislative Decree 177 of 2005:
"Consolidated Law about Radio-television".
This consolidated law contains norms
ensuring accessibility to the mass media
even to us, people with sensory impairments.
Article 4 of the text I just mentioned
says:
"The reception of radio/TV programmes by citizens with sensory impairments"
"shall be favoured;"
"adequate measures shall be introduced to this end"
"after consultation with the trade associations".
Moreover, there is article 45 concerning
the definition of the tasks of the general public radio-television service.
This public radio-television service
guarantees "the broadcasting of all TV and radio programmes"
"of public service of the concessionaire"
"with full coverage of the national territory,"
"as far as this is allowed by the state of science and technology".
It also guarantees the "adoption of suitable protection measures"
"in favour of people with sensory impairments".
Another regulatory source
in our legislation
is the UN Convention
on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities of December 2006,
ratified by the law of 2009.
It aims at promoting, protecting and guaranteeing
the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and basic freedoms
by people with disabilities.
It promotes the respect for their intrinsic dignity.
By virtue of this ratification,
the implementation and observance of the UN Convention
is an unconditional obligation for the Italian State.
It shall introduce suitable measures
to guarantee that people with disabilities
have access to information and communication,
in order to allow them to live independently
and to tear down barriers obstructing the access
to information and communication services.
The Convention requires that the States
introduce suitable measures
guaranteeing the freedoms of thought and speech.
The prerequisite is receiving information
through suitable means of communication,
so that people with disabilities have access easily
to the information destined to the general public
and so that mass media are encouraged
to make their services available to people with disabilities.
The Convention also establishes that it is necessary to guarantee
the right to take part in cultural life
on the basis of equality,
by taking all necessary measures to ensure that people with disabilities
have access to television programmes in accessible formats.
Talking about Rai,
in the service agreement 2010-2012
Rai gradually increases in the course of three years
the quantity of subtitled programmes
until in 2012
at least 70% of the overall broadcasting time are reached.
But the version 2010-2012
establishes a total of at least 10 thousand hours with subtitles.
If compared to the total of 26 thousand broadcasted hours,
this represents only 38% of the total broadcasted hours.
This is a worsening if we consider
that the service agreement 2007-2009 established that 60%
of the overall broadcasted programmes of the three Rai networks had to be subtitled.
I'd like to add that the Association for Social Development and Support onA.I.R.
in its statute pursues goals consistent with the above mentioned laws
as to accessibility and breaking down of communication barriers.
The goals of the statute of the Association
are of inclusive, social, educational, cultural and recreational nature.
The Association wants to support deaf signers and oralists
in communicating and accessing audiovisual products
through services based on respeaking
and other subtitling and speech-to-text techniques.
Subtitling, producing, distributing and organizing
film, television and theatre shows.
These are the goals of the Association.
I've concluded my speech.
As to accessibility to mass media,
I think it's a great project
if they can at least grant access
to lectures
at university.
The needs of the deaf
can be consistent with these goals.
Thank you for listening. I've concluded my speech.
Thank you, Giovanni.
Thank you, Giovanni, for your speech
which was definitely interesting.
As Tiziana said earlier, I'd like to emphasize
that we are planning to cooperate with the University of Cagliari
to subtitle university lectures.
We are making progress in this field, too.
We entered other cooperation agreements
with other universities for traineeships.
For the project OltreSuoni we cooperate
with Synthema, a company from Pisa,
and the association TDM2000 from Cagliari.
As I introduce the next speaker, Giacomo Pirelli,
I seize the opportunity to talk about our goals,
the purpose for which the Association was founded.
The Association does not only want to spread respeaking.
We talk about respeaking, because we know what to say about it.
I wrote a thesis on interlingual respeaking.
Tiziana, as I said earlier, wrote a thesis on respeaking.
Dr Eugeni's PhD thesis
is one of the first theses about respeaking.
But our goal is to promote
the integration of the deaf
within this society.
It is not enough to subtitle television
and not all programmes are subtitled anyway.
There are many other occasions in which the deaf are marginalized.
In our small way we want to fight these...
these injustices,
because people are marginalized.
I now give the floor to Giacomo Pirelli.
He is a member of many deaf associations.
He moderates a Facebook group
about the diffusion of subtitles for the deaf
in theatres, cinemas and on television.
For our Association
he is in charge of the communication with associations.
Some of the people present here know him.
Giacomo is deaf as well,
like Giovanni Polidoro.
His address won't be subtitled, though,
because he will show a very eloquent PowerPoint presentation.
It contains everything.
We seize this opportunity for two specific reasons.
First: the respeaker can take a break, as there is only one respeaker today,
so no one takes turns with her.
Moreover, she is not looking at the texts.
We have them here as syllabus.
For technical reasons, she doesn't have them.
It would have been smart to provide her with them, but we didn't.
The other reason is that, for a few instants,
even you, people who can hear, can put yourselves in the shoes of the deaf.
For once, or for the second time if you've done it before,
you can understand what it means to have to read without hearing anything.
Try to understand.
The floor is yours, Giacomo.
Erika, who kindly provides us with subtitles today
with Claudio's help, goes back to work. They both resume work.
We also thank the CCAC for allowing us
to show you this video.
Together with Giacomo's very interesting presentation,
it helps us understand the existing needs,
that we try to satisfy.
I'm sure there are other people here who would like to share their opinion.
They can do so at the end, during the Q&A session.
Now we will proceed
with a different, but very important aspect.
As I mentioned earlier, at the moment we cooperate with three universities:
the University of Parma, the University of Teramo and the University of Roma Tre.
Professor Franca Orletti is the
director of the Linguistic Department of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
of the University of Roma Tre
as well as the coordinator of the Masters in Translation and Communication
in Web, Cinema and Television Careers.
I'm sorry for hesitating, but I don't remember acronyms, it's a problem of mine.
Please.
I thank the Association onA.I.R., Carlo Eugeni and the President for inviting me.
I thank them for the emotions called forth by what I heard so far.
Thank you also for having strengthened
what I've always believed in during almost 40 years of didactic research
regarding the relations between orality, writing and social inclusion.
Many of the subjects discussed so far
are part of my career path.
However, I often asked myself, for other reasons than the ones expressed here,
whether it would be better to lock oneself in the ivory tower of abstract research,
as many successful colleagues of mine do.
In this way one needn't tackle the struggle of applied research.
I've been dealing with immigrants and social inclusion for years.
Events like this conference confirm the significance of what I've done so far.
They awaken a renewed interest for research and cooperation.
I approached respeaking thanks to a casual encounter.
At a convention of the Italian Association of Voice Sciences (AISV)
I met Dr Eugeni and I listened to him.
I coordinate a masters course about writing, translation, communication
in web, cinema and television careers.
Listening to Carlo Eugeni talk about respeaking persuaded me.
I had class and let Carlo Eugeni talk in my stead.
That was it.
That's how the cooperation with a new association started.
The masters already cooperated with the AIDAC,
the Association of Audiovisual Script Translators and Adaptors.
If you want, I can quickly summarize the goals of this masters.
In this masters we started training young people.
Some of them are here today because they are trainees at onA.I.R.
The goals of this masters are:
to fill the gap between demand of qualified workforce in the media
and the offer of young graduates.
To respond to the need of vocational training
of those who already work in the field of communication or similar.
The masters aims at training experts in translation and dialogue adaptation
for television and cinema
as well as web communication experts.
I want to say that in the masters
we had already tackled the problem of subtitles.
We've had an agreement with the National Deaf Association for a few years.
The PhD course in Linguistics includes a curriculum
for the training and research of the deaf.
I use the term deaf because they expressly asked me to.
Subtitling was therefore already part of the training path.
Carlo Eugeni's contribution brought new life to it
thanks to his expertise, his curiosity, his prodding.
A lot of the things mentioned here had me thinking.
I have institutional tasks which I will have even after my department will cease.
I thought about what can be done by university in this field.
What has been said in the last address and in the previous speech
about accessibility from a legal point of view
made me think of two things.
First of all we need training for experts.
You contribute to this training, but it should start at university.
Not to train translators, but respeaking experts.
We need to define within which curriculum.
In training there's also the problem
of accessibility of the excluded communities.
Doctor Pirelli said it very well:
the problem of university lectures.
In Roma Tre we have a group of very skilled sign language interpreters.
They help me all the time.
Even today I met my deaf PhD student
aided by a sign language interpreter.
But there are only few of them and they can only follow few courses.
The use of respeaking in university halls
would mean broadening the access
and the chance that study materials are put online and taken up again.
It would mean an extraordinarily wider access.
I decided that the first time I meet the vice-chancellor
I will promote this idea.
Why don't we do respeaking at Roma Tre
which is really open towards disability ?
Other aspects mentioned earlier
are social inclusion and the relationship with immigration.
Carlo knows, because we started a national project on these subjects.
We imagined to create didactic materials
about educational linguistics both for the deaf and for immigrants.
Another subject of my research is linguistic simplification,
because respeakers repeat, but must often reformulate.
Linguistic simplification is not merely the reduction,
as is often the case, of the rate of subordinate clauses with automatic indices.
It requires other skills.
I dealt with it many years ago.
With a team I rewrote the tax form Unico 2000.
The Unico you used is easier than before thanks to the work of linguists.
The simplification is therefore another subject, like social inclusion.
I talked about two aspects: training and social inclusion.
Another aspect is local work.
What I mentioned is already local work.
There are other moments of life which could be the object of my research.
Moments in which comprehension and interaction are serious questions.
I was thinking of emergency calls.
You mentioned a software programme
which should enable the respeaking of phone calls.
In my opinion it would be very useful for emergency calls.
Even communication in the ER.
If you go to an Italian ER you will notice
that of late 90% of the users are foreigners.
Communication problems are huge.
Probably if the information were immediately given
by the doctors in writing,
this would greatly favour interaction.
Other research ideas.
I deal with doctor-patient interaction in the OB/GYN context
with foreign patients and a lot of ideas for work opportunities opened up.
Therefore I tell you: Let's step up to the plate !
Let's work together. I'll give you all the resources I have left.
I hope I still have much to give. Thank you.
Thank you, Professor Orletti.
With this speech I am once again proud to say
that also thanks to this kind of cooperation onA.I.R. is on the right path.
I seize the chance...
about what Professor Orletti said
regarding sign language interpreters.
I'd like to say that we don't want to substitute sign language.
We are very democratic in this respect.
We deal with respeaking because it's what we are able to do.
But our goal is to integrate all the deaf into society.
This is why we are glad to work alongside sign language
for all deaf oralists who don't speak sign language,
in order to allow them to live as normal a life as possible.
This is the framework for this project, which we hope will be carried on.
Well. We've reached quite an important moment:
the handing of the certificate of honorary President to Professor Pirelli.
I'm sorry, he's an engineer. I'm used to saying "professor".
I'll present the certificate. Dr Eugeni will do the introduction.
As a senior member of the executive
I rank second for introductions.
I'm sorry for this little sketch.
Why are we presenting Giuliano Pirelli with the honorary presidency ?
I wrote it, I remember.
There are many reasons why we could present
Giuliano Pirelli with the honorary presidency.
The most straightforward, scientific and indisputable reason
is that Giuliano Pirelli invented respeaking.
He didn't patent it, because the office where he worked before retiring,
the Joint Research Centre, focuses on public awareness for some projects.
Giuliano Pirelli in 1998... Sorry, 1996, I always make this mistake.
1996, 1998 and 2000 are three important dates.
The first continuous speech recognition software was released in 1996.
It enables to dictate in an almost natural way.
Giuliano Pirelli had a simple but brilliant idea,
as Tolstoj said, although I've never reached the end of one of his books.
I congratulate anyone who made it. They have all my respect.
The idea was really simple: using speech recognition software
not to write without using one's hands, as was done before,
but to subtitle in real time
events which otherwise wouldn't be accessible
to those who don't understand the source text due to language or sensory limits.
So he equipped his son...
Why didn't you do it yourself ?
In the videos we always see his son, Lorenzo.
Ah, you were shooting.
He equipped his son Lorenzo with Dragon 1
and made him subtitle in real time
the World Championship match which was being broadcasted.
I will show you a very short, unreleased video with historic relevance.
It only lasts 30 seconds.
You will see Lorenzo doing the respeaking for his brother Giacomo,
i.e. Mister Pirelli, who spoke about accessibility earlier.
We'll see a very touching scene
in which we can see for real how useful respeaking can be.
It is a disallowed goal.
The audio quality isn't great, but you can see it clearly.
You see the disallowed goal and Giacomo displeased
only when he understands from the subtitles that the goal was disallowed.
Can we launch it ? He launches it himself. An unrivalled honorary president.
Can we please change screen ?
Do you want to see it again ?
You saw that subtitles appeared with a considerable delay.
It's quite an old software programme.
You saw that Giacomo didn't react
when the disallowed goal was announced by the TV and by Lorenzo.
When the subtitle appears, he puts his hands to his head.
We will release this video, if we are granted permission.
In my opinion it is extraordinary and proves that actions like ours are useful.
For having invented respeaking, now...
I hope there is room, so I won't have to do any more sketches.
We grant Giuliano Pirelli the honorary presidency of the Association onA.I.R.
The presidency is presented by our Miss President, Francesca Marchionne.
We are proud that one Italian
is among the inventors of a communication system.
Even if, like Meucci, you should have patented it.
I give the floor to Giuliano Pirelli, engineer and friend.
He will tell us about his project
in which he developed this technique.
Only in 2001
the BBC implemented it.
Well. You are probably expecting a speech.
Before the speech I'd like to give Carlo a video reply.
I reply to you with a video.
It is true that I invented real respeaking, as Carlo says.
I proved it with that video.
But I am much prouder of my invention of a much simpler form of respeaking
I used 10-15 years before, when Giacomo was a child.
I used the technology available twenty years before:
post-its.
As it is nice to watch, I'll show you.
This is Pluto the dog. Pluto is a dog.
Dog. Dog dancing, listening to music.
Pluto hears music. Pluto dances with the music.
The dog Pluto. Pluto the dog. Dog. Woof-woof.
He dances with the music.
Less professional,
but more agreeable.
Now I should say something more serious.
I chose the title
"From project Voice to project onA.I.R.:"
"The same enthusiasm in an evolving world".
It really is the same enthusiasm.
The same enthusiasm as twenty years ago
when we used the best available technology for something innovative.
It is the same enthusiasm as today.
Carlo went up the stairs ten times to check what was going on upstairs.
The software was installed last-minute.
The technological difficulties.
But in a changing world.
What changed in the technical field ?
What changed is that on this table we have notebooks.
In the control booth there are many more.
Almost everyone here has a cell phone
and many other computer-like devices in their pockets.
Back then Dragon was a miracle.
We loaded Dragon with 25 floppy disks.
We needed 25 hours for installation and training.
Now it's done in 25 minutes.
In 25 minutes they have been able to recreate efficient conditions.
So the bets are higher.
Twenty years ago we experimented with subtitling over the phone
with modest, technical, demonstrative results.
Now we actually begin to talk about it.
Messaging through cell phones enabled a real integration of the deaf
at least from this point of view.
We almost forgot to subtitle speech over the phone.
Now technology allows it again.
Back then we were happy if we could subtitle TV programmes,
help Rai and the BBC improve something in their subtitled programmes.
Now we can do much more.
This conference is subtitled without many problems.
When we talk about integration...
What Giacomo said earlier. The immediacy of the system.
Sometimes I follow debates on the quality of subtitles.
In my opinion it is really of minor importance that the quality is 80 or 90%.
The reality is that Giacomo and many other hearing-impaired people
fully took part in today's event.
They gave their contribution, understood.
With a teacher in class they understood and proved to everybody else
that deaf people simply can't hear. They don't have other problems.
They have problems with communication, not with intelligence.
This enthuses me.
I see a group of young people, as I was young myself, carrying on something.
Fate made this event take place today
and I retired on September 1.
I see a continuity.
I can't but encourage all these young people.
I want to say something to the speaker who talked about his experience
as subtitler, record writer and then about the use of technology.
He said: "I was afraid of giving up everything I had done before".
What he did is in his head, it's experience.
This is why a deep friendship has always bound me to Carlo Eugeni.
He came to me as PhD student,
he did part of his PhD at the Joint Research Centre.
We discovered this complementarity between me as engineer and technician
and a person who is open-minded enough
to understand a language, memorize instantly
and repeat it in another language or in a slightly summarized Italian.
This is a terrific achievement only an interpreter or linguist can reach.
It's very nice and I'm very happy about this cooperation.
I hope it will bring results for everyone.
Best wishes to everyone and thanks to everyone for being here.
Thank you, Giuliano. And thank you for accepting the honorary presidency.
And best wishes for your retirement.
Lucky you for reaching it !
Well, we were asked to finish by 7 p.m.
I don't know if we still have time for some quick comments from the public.
Do we ? Ok.
Sorry. I just realized this.
The rooms of the Chamber strictly have to be closed by 7 p.m.
We are in Italy, so 7.10 p.m. is just as fine,
but let's not go too far.
- I am coming over to give the floor. - Please raise your hand to speak.
I am sorry. We have no sign language interpreter.
Is there any hearing person who can interpret into sign language ?
- He can write. - No.
This is great, because Giovanni is deaf as well.
But it's understandable.
- You could have... - Yes, we could have arranged sign language interpreting.
But we had notified that the event would be subtitled
and there would be no sign language interpreting.
I didn't understand.
Well. He raises an objection and with reason.
We talk about accessibility but don't offer sign language interpreting.
This is a real problem.
We admit it.
But we had notified
the whole staff of Fiadda and ENS.
Fiadda probably didn't care in the slightest.
The ENS knew that this conference
wouldn't be interpreted into sign language but only subtitled.
- As you like. - Yes, you can write.
Ok. Sorry.
He has been working as IT specialist for a company for twenty years.
An international company.
He often finds himself in difficulty when he speaks in meetings.
When interpreting is provided, the problem is IT terminology,
because the interpreter doesn't know IT terms.
Subtitles would be very useful
because subtitles translate from Italian into Italian
and also recognize technical terms.
Right now he is focussing on obtaining the relay service.
This service has almost disappeared,
but was used for a long time in Italy.
It enabled the communication between the deaf and public administration,
even doctors. I'm sorry if I'm being simplistic. It was roughly this way.
What did you do ? You created a software programme ?
As the presence of an operator can cause problems,
he developed a software programme.
It is still experimental.
It uses an operating system different from the software we are using.
It enables real-time transcription without an operator.
The question is: What is your goal ?
He is working on the relay service.
He talked about the software he is experimenting with.
He wants to know what exactly the goal of onA.I.R. is.
As I said earlier,
our goal is very simple:
We want to grant
full accessibility also to the deaf.
We need various projects to do so.
One of them is OltreSuoni, Tiziana mentioned other projects.
Another project could be developed
thanks to contributions like this one.
We didn't know.
But a project proving the feasibility of something
creates a situation in which its users
request the same service again, once it has ended.
In this way, by requesting that service,
companies, free-lancers,
the various fields involved in
television, web radio and normal radio
request the service,
because it is usable, because there is a need.
This is how we proceed:
With our projects we create the need.
Better: the need is already there.
But we see that this need
can be met, eliminated.
So we proceed by creating the service, we hope.
This is our goal.
Obviously we will be very happy
to send to whoever requests it all the specific details
about the single projects we've mentioned today.
Just send an email to our Association.
We will give you all the details
of the projects we've only mentioned briefly today.
Is it okay ?
He said: I congratulate Lorenzo,
Giuliano's son and Giacomo's brother,
for his will
to subtitle the match for Giacomo. Thank you.
I'd like to say...
I'd like to say one last thing.
Then we'll finish. This combination of translation and respeaking was amazing.
In this way we all understood. It was a double transfer.
This illustrates what we try to do.
I thank you all for being here.
- Another question ? - One minute.
Ok. We have time for another question if someone wants to step in.
Sure. Professor Andrea Paoloni.
I just wanted to say that for seminars, lectures, etc.,
respeaking is not necessary, in my opinion.
The teacher only needs to speak into the microphone and the machine transcribes.
The performance might be slightly worse,
but the costs are much lower.
The equipment is often available at university.
We only need to use it.
Yes, in this regard...
Can I answer ? I don't want to upstage you.
We have Giuliano Pirelli's experience,
to which I also contributed for a couple of years,
the project Voice.
To this day we go for free
to universities, primary, middle and high schools.
We say: We offer a respeaking course.
You buy a 200 euro software programme
and can subtitle yourselves.
Unfortunately they are often against it
because they've never done it before.
What happens then ?
If you offer a service you completely take care of,
they gladly accept.
Otherwise they do not make the effort of using the microphone, speaking clearly,
doing something which seems more than it actually is.
It would be necessary to explain to everyone
that they can subtitle themselves.
We obviously encourage it, although this means someone is out of a job.
We want to further develop the technology.
Unfortunately we experience it on a daily basis.
So, yes. If you help us with your experience and expertise
to increase awareness, we will be your partners.
He answered as I would have,
like other people sitting here today.
Well. We really are at the end.
I thank all the speakers, once again MP Beltrandi,
MEP Mauro for his video message,
Alessandro Massari, who is standing next to the column,
for helping us, together with Mr. Beltrandi, in obtaining the room
and all of you, who had the patience to listen to us so far.
I hope you understood the message
and any information which could lead to future projects.
Greetings to everybody.
We also thank Erika,
who despite the earlier accident supported us tonight,
and Claudio Russello, who was with her.
He is also a member of our Association as well as a professional respeaker.
He offered his expertise for free
to assist Erika in this adventure. Thank you.