For over six years now, respeaking has been used by TV broadcasters such as the BBC to provide live subtitling for their viewers. As the demand for quantity and quality in live subtitling increases, respeaking seems to be gaining ground as the most efficient and cost-effective method for producing live (and even pre-recorded) subtitles, considering both the results obtained and the training required. This is manifested in the now widespread adoption of this technique in TV channels across Europe. However, the increasing importance of respeaking is still to be reflected at a university level, where research is scarce and courses on this subject are few and far between. As a result, most TV channels have to train their own professionals but do not usually find research studies that can support their training methods.

The present workshop aims to provide ideas, alternatives and skills to train respeakers, be it in a classroom environment or in a professional setting. First of all, a brief introduction will be offered, where respeaking will be described and positioned with regard to both subtitling and interpreting. Secondly, a description will be given of a) the main skills required for respeaking, whether they are related to subtitling, interpreting or specific to respeaking and b) several practical exercises that can help to obtain the latter skills. Participants will then have the opportunity to practise these exercises with the respeaking software Protitle, which does not require lengthy training and can thus show immediate results. They will also be informed of the most common errors made by professional respeakers and will be able to test different solutions to avoid them. Finally, participants will be introduced to different types of speech-recognition software that can be used to! respeak, such as Dragon and ViaScribe, a state-of-the-art IBM software that does not require the dictation of punctuation marks.

Proposed structure:

1. Introduction: general overview, description of skills required to respeak
2. Hands-on (a): practice of different exercises to acquire respeaking skills
3. Hands-on (b): practice of possible solutions to avoid common errors
4. The use of different speech-recognition software in respeaking