This project has move to Tampere University
Please, visit the new website at https://projects.tuni.fi/mutable/
— THIS SITE IS NO LONGER UPDATED —
Collaboration within the academia
The project’s home is at University of Helsinki, Faculty of Arts and Department of Languages.
The University of Helsinki is the oldest and largest institution of academic education in Finland, an international scientific community of 40,000 students and researchers, and 11 faculties. In international university rankings, the University of Helsinki typically ranks among the top 100. The University of Helsinki is a member of more than half of all national and Nordic centres of excellence in research. It is also the only Finnish university to have received an invitation to join the League of European Research Universities (LERU), which is an association of the leading research-intensive universities in Europe.
MUTABLE’s home, the Department of Languages, encompasses a wide spectrum of topics, languages and cultures – from African and Asian to classical and modern European. These are explored for the benefit of both the scientific community and the public. MUTABLE’s local environment is the Degree Program of Translating and Interpreting and the Translation Studies Research Community.
Other partners at University of Helsinki are the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Research on “Intersubjectivity in Interaction” located at the university. This project fits into the Centre’s subproject that investigates the recruitment of linguistic and non-linguistic resources to reach mutual understanding. In addition, a research article on speech prosody will be co-authored with Dr. Mari Wiklund, Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, who studies interaction with a specific focus on speech prosody, gaze behaviour and misunderstanding situations.
Collaboration abroad
Internationally, MUTABLE collaborates with Prof. Hanna Risku at the Centre for Translation Studies, University of Vienna, Austria, and with Dr. Reinhold Schmitt at Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim, Germany. Prof. Risku is one the leading scholars studying the socio-cognitive aspects of translation processes, and the collaboration with her research group strengthens the project’s methodological design and the analysis of the AD process. This project can also be fruitful to Prof. Risku’s own research as it provides data on a new kind of translation process. Dr. Schmitt’s expertise in multimodal interaction analysis and video data acquisition and analysis support the project and are also helpful in the analysis of the German-speaking data. During MUTABLE, collaboration becomes concretized through joint publications, data sessions and research visits.
The poster announcing the guest lecture of Maija Hirvonen at Translation Studies Centre of the University of Vienna.
Collaboration outside the academia
MUTABLE has tight connections and collaboration with organisations, audio describers, and AD users in Finland and abroad, including the Finnish NGO “Cultural Service for the Visually Impaired” (Näkövammaisten kulttuuripalvelu ry).
Listen to a sample of Finnish film audio description online – Kuuntele, miltä elokuvan kuvailutulkkaus kuulostaa!
Näyte Salainen metsäni -elokuvan kuvailutulkkauksesta (elokuvan tuotanto Double Back Documentaries, 2017; kuvailutulkkaus Pipsa Toikka):
Other research
The project leader is the Principal Investigator of University of Helsinki in an international research and innovation project, MeMAD (Methods for Managing Audiovisual Data: Combining Automatic Efficiency with Human Accuracy).
Check out a demo video combining audio description with automatic multimodal content analysis, produced by Aalto Speech Recognition Research Group.