Make your live content accessible

LIVE SUBTITLING via RESPEAKING

This service is for individuals, businesses, media corporations, event organisers and educational institutions with live content that needs subtitles.

I also support language and access service providers as a freelance respeaker, also known as a live subtitler or speech-to-text interpreter.

What is respeaking?

Live content – whether it’s breaking news, a conference, a meeting or an online class – isn’t always accessible to everyone in real-time due to language or sensory barriers. Live subtitles are a way to make content more inclusive.

There are different ways to produce live subtitles: using keyboards (Stenotype, Velotype), automation (automatic speech recognition) or respeaking. I specialise in respeaking (known as voice-writing in the USA).

Respeaking makes content accessible to a wider audience, including children, the elderly, foreigners, people with sensory, learning or cognitive disabilities who would benefit from live text and people viewing content with the audio on mute.

Respeakers (or voice-writers) create subtitles for your event as it happens. This is called live subtitling (or live captioning). How does it work? Respeakers listen to the audio and repeat, paraphrase or translate what’s said adding punctuation, labels to identify speakers and sounds. Speech recognition software – such as Dragon – turns our words into text. As speech recognition is not always 100% accurate, respeakers also make live error corrections of misrecognised words.

Respeaking is a highly skilled task requiring fluency, speed and accuracy. I’ve been studying the practice for five years and have been a professional respeaker for three.

Here’s an illustration of the interlingual respeaking process from Spanish into English.

The interlingual live subtitling process via respeaking illustrated in three steps

Services

Intralingual live subtitles

Same-language live subtitles for your English-speaking live content.

Interlingual live subtitles

Translated Spanish to English live subtitles for your live content.

If you need live subtitling in a language combination outside those I offer, I can recommend colleagues covering English into Spanish, as well as Dutch, French, German, Italian and Polish.

Want to become a respeaker? Contact me for bespoke respeaking training.

The result

Credible

High-quality live subtitling enhances your professionalism.

Engaging

By live subtitling your event or class, it’s easier for your viewers to concentrate and learn. Live subtitles improve students’ performance, strengthening comprehension and retention of information.

Accessible

Expand your content’s reach. Cater to the deaf and hard of hearing, speakers of other languages and those viewing content on mute.

Inclusive

Show that for you, inclusivity is not an afterthought. Companies that embrace inclusion outperform their competitors.

Future-proof

Adapt to the explosion of live internet content. Live subtitling helps your audience avoid the dreaded Zoom fatigue.

Let's get to work

Book me for projects of all sizes, from one-off respeaking engagements to ongoing retainers for your regular live subtitling needs.

Rates for respeaking start from £120 per hour depending on the language direction and subject matter. Send me the details of your live event or broadcast for a custom quote.

You’ll get

  • My preparation time before the event.
  • My time and labour on the day.
  • A transcript of the event to share with attendees to be used as notes or kept as a record.
  • If you record and make your event available afterwards, live subtitles can be re-synced and burned onto the video or delivered as a subtitle file.
  • Questions answered following the event.

Give your live audience the full experience of your event.