Agnieszka Szarkowska is University Professor in the Institute of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warsaw, Head of the research group Audiovisual Translation Lab (AVT Lab), and Honorary Research Associate at University College London.

Agnieszka is a researcher, academic teacher, ex-translator, and translator trainer. Her research projects include eye tracking studies on subtitling, audio description, multilingualism in subtitling for the deaf and the hard of hearing, and respeaking. Drawing on her passion for teaching, she has co-founded AVT Masterclass, an online platform for professional audiovisual translation education.

Agnieszka is a member of the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (ESIST) and a recipient of the Jan Ivarsson Award 2022.

Contact: a.szarkowska@uw.edu.pl

Łukasz Dutka is an audiovisual translator, subtitling trainer and expert in media accessibility. He’s one of the founders of AVT Masterclass, a former director of the Global Alliance of Speech-to-Text Captioning, and a member of the Management Board of Dostepni.eu, an accessibility services provider. He studied applied linguistics as well as comparative literature.

In 2012, he became an in-house subtitler for Polish public broadcaster and was responsible for SDH subtitling and semi-live subtitling of news broadcasts. As a member of Dostepni.eu team, he pioneered live subtitling through respeaking in Poland with the first accessible political and social events in 2013, first interlingual live subtitling in 2015 and first Polish television broadcast with live subtitling through respeaking in 2017. Since 2012, he has worked as a freelance subtitler and QC’er for leading localization companies, including working on many high-level titles. In 2019, he helped set up a live subtitling unit for Polsat, a leading TV broadcaster in Poland.

He has nine years of experience in running training programmes for companies as well as teaching university-level courses on audiovisual translation, subtitling, subtitling for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, and interpreting. He is a member of the Polish Association of Audiovisual Translators, the University of Warsaw Audiovisual Translation Lab (AVT Lab), European Society for Translation Studies (EST) and European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (ESIST). Born by the mountains, he now lives by the ocean in a multilingual family that speaks Polish, English, Spanish, Italian, Swedish and Portuguese. He’s a passionate movie-goer, reader, swimmer, chocolate-eater and a coffee addict.

Contact: lukasz@subtitler.pl

Graduate of the Institute of Applied Linguistics. In his MA thesis he described his auteur method of note-taking in consecutive interpreting using a computer with a speech synthesizer. In the doctoral dissertation he explored the community of blind interpreters. He is interested in audio description both as a researcher and a member of the target group.

Wojtek writes and edits texts and works as a translator, interpreter and respeaker (working languages: English and Spanish). He is also a social activist.

graduated with a Bachelor’s degree from the Institute of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warsaw, where she has also undertaken the MA Program in translation and interpreting. For her BA thesis, she joined the team of researchers conducting an eye-tracking study on the dubbing effect. Being a member of the AVT Lab, her main scientific interests concern audiovisual translation and media accessibility. Apart from doing freelance translations and subtitling, she also works with speech recognition and as a respeaker.

Is a Research Fellow on the WATCH-ME project at the Institute of Applied Linguistics of the University of Warsaw. She has an MA in Screen Translation from the University of Leeds (UK) and a PhD in Experimental Translation Studies from the same institution, where she investigated the effects of watching reversely subtitled videos on L2 mnemonic retention in advanced L2 Italian learners through an eye-tracking experiment.

Before moving to Poland, she worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Bristol (UK) on a project assessing the impact of productivity-enhancing technologies – such as machine translation and behaviour-tracking tools – on professional translators. She is particularly interested in the cognitive and psycholinguistic aspects of translation, both as a learning tool and as a professional practice.

She is a member of Subtle – The Subtitler’s Association (UK), the UK Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI), and the European Society for Translation Studies (EST).

I specialise in legal and practical aspects of accessibility (i.e. media and events accessibility). I am Deputy-Chairman of the Board of Widzialni Foundation – an NGO specializing in websites and live events accessibility, and I co-operate with the Culture without Barriers Foundation.

I am the owner of Dostepni.eu – a team of professional creators specializing in media accessibility, an industry partner of the ILSA project. In 2013, Dostepni.eu was the first in Poland to introduduce live subtitling with respeaking during conferences and cultural events and implement subtitling in live on-line streaming (2014) and TV shows (2017). My company also provides sign language interpreting services for TV broadcasters and Internet.

Sonia is a student at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw, a freelance audiovisual translator and SDH subtitler. She is currently working on her MA thesis on senior citizens as secondary users of the AudioMovie application. In her future academic career she plans to further explore the topic of senior citizens as recipients of audiovisual content.

She holds a Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Warsaw. She graduated with honours, defending the first thesis in Poland on text-to-speech audio description. She has also completed postgraduate studies on audiovisual translation at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities. Defended at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Agnieszka’s doctoral dissertation focused on the reception of audio description and was produced within the framework of the European Project Hybrid Broadcast Broadband for All. She is a member of the TransMedia Catalonia Research Group and University of Warsaw Audiovisual Translation Lab (AVT Lab). Agnieszka is the author of over 15 publications on audiovisual translation. University lecturer for almost 10 years (Autonomous University of Barcelona, University of Warsaw, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, University of Łódź).

Agnieszka combines her academic expertise with experience in the audiovisual localization industry. She has been working as a freelance subtitler and audio describer for various linear and non-linear providers for over 10 years. She has also experience from working with global media production and post-production companies. Member of European Society for Translation Studies (EST), European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (ESIST) and Polish Audiovisual Translators Association (STAW).

Contact: agnieszka_walczak@hotmail.com