Activist Subtitling Workshop
Activist Subtitling Workshop
A one-day subtitling training workshop held in Cairo, 30 April 2014
This workshop was held for activist subtitlers, particularly those associated with Mosireen, and coordinated by Katharine Halls, Salma El-Tarzi and Danya Nada. It was delivered by Dr Luis Perez-Gonzalez and introduced by Professor Mona Baker, both from the University of Manchester, UK.
Click here to download a copy of the PowerPoint presentation slides
Initial call for participation
This half-day workshop will reflect on current subtitling practices by activist communities in Egypt and explore new strategies learnt from other amateur subtitling subcultures. The workshop will be delivered by Dr Luis Perez-Gonzalez, Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Manchester, UK, who has published extensively on audiovisual translation, with particular emphasis on amateur translation.
The first part will present a short overview of subtitling conventions developed by the media industry. Together we will discuss to what extent they inform the work of activist translators using web-based tools such as Amara and YouTube.
The second part will look at a different set of conventions used by amateur fansubbing groups, and examine how they help achieve the group’s aesthetic or political agendas.
In the final part, we will explore whether and how activist subtitlers can adopt some of these alternative practices, discussing how useful they can be to activists’ political agendas. In this section we will also become acquainted with the technology required to put this new approach into practice.