I am an Assistant Professor in Machine Translation at the Leiden Centre for Linguistics. My research navigates disciplinary boundaries between translation studies, computational linguistics and machine learning, focusing on automatic subtitling, and language technologies for audiovisual translation and media accessibility.

More information about Alina Karakanta

Research

I am conducting research on speech and machine translation for audiovisual content and media accessibility. I obtained my PhD in Neural Machine Translation from the University of Trento on the topic of Automatic Subtitling. My thesis contributions covered multimodal data collection, implementation of speech and machine translation models and new metrics for evaluating subtitling-specific aspects. Previously, I was involved in research projects focusing on exploring variation in translation and interpreting, and on MT for low-resource languages.

Grants and awards

I received an EAMT 2021 Student grant for the project 'Towards a methodology for evaluating automatic subtitling'. Goal of the project was to research post-editing in automatic subtitling and the correlation of post-editing effort with automatic MT evaluation metrics.

Curriculum Vitae

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

• 2022-today Machine translation consultant, Freelancer.
• 2014-2023 Official Translator and Post-Editor EL, RO, EN, DE, Freelancer
• 2019-2022 Machine Translation Researcher at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy. Speech and Machine Translation for Audiovisual Content/
• 2017-2018 Research Assistant at the Dept. Language Science & Technology, Universität des Saarlandes. SFB-1102/B7: Modelling human translation with a noisy channel

EDUCATION

• 2022 - PhD Information Engineering & Computer Science. Fondazione Bruno Kessler/ University of Trento. Trento, Italy
  Thesis: Automatic Subtitling: A new Paradigm
• 2023 - MA Accessibility to Media, Arts & Culture. University of Macerata. Online/Macerata, Italy
• 2017 - MSc Language Science & Technology. Saarland University. Saarbrücken, Germany
• 2023 - BA Interpreting studies. Ionian University. Corfu, Greece
• 2014 - BA Translation studies. Ionian University. Corfu, Greece

Selected publications

JOURNAL ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS
• Karakanta, Alina and David Orrego-Carmona (2023). “Subtitling in Transition: the case of TED talks”. In: Translation in Transition: Bridging Human and Machine Intelligence. American Translators Association series. John Benjamins.

• Papi, S., Gaido, M., Karakanta, A., Cettolo, M., Negri, M., & Turchi, M. (2023). Direct speech translation for automatic subtitling. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 11, 1355-1376.

• Karakanta, Alina (2022). “Experimental research in automatic subtitling: At the crossroads between Machine Translation and Audiovisual Translation”. In: Translation Spaces. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ ts.21021.kar.

• Teich, Elke, José Martínez Martínez, and Alina Karakanta (2020). “Translation, information theory and cognition”. In: The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Cognition. Ed. by Fabio Alves and Arnt Lykke Jakobsen. London: Routledge. Chap. 20. ISBN: 9781138037007.

• Karakanta, Alina, Jon Dehdari, and Josef van Genabith (2018). “Neural machine translation for low-resource languages without parallel corpora”. In: Machine Translation 32.1, pp. 167–189. DOI: 10.1007/s10590-017-9203-5.

CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
• Karakanta, Alina, Luisa Bentivogli, Mauro Cettolo, Matteo Negri, and Marco Turchi (2022). “Post-editing in Automatic Subtitling: A Subtitlers’ perspective”. In: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation. Ghent, Belgium: European Association for Machine Translation, pp. 259–268. URL: https://aclanthology.org/2022.eamt-1.29.

• Karakanta, Alina, Matteo Negri, and Marco Turchi (2020). “Is 42 the Answer to Everything in Subtitling-oriented Speech Translation?” In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation. Online: Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 209-219.

• Karakanta, Alina, Supratik Bhattacharya, Shravan Nayak, Timo Baumann, Matteo Negri, and Marco Turchi (2020). “The Two Shades of Dubbing in Neural Machine Translation”. In: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Barcelona, (Online): International Committee on Computational Linguistics, pp. 4327–4333.

Publications