Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
The Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) (http://www.uab.es) is recognized around the world for its quality and innovation in research and quality teaching. The UAB coordinates a potent scientific and technological centre (the Esfera UAB), promotes new business projects, directs and projects its productive activity towards its socio-economic surroundings, and disseminates its newly acquired knowledge.
In Spain, the UAB has been a pioneer in adapting university teaching to the ECTS model and gives priority to teaching innovation research projects. Within the Erasmus programmes, the UAB has bilateral agreements with more than 400 universities in 20 countries and 98 teachers have participated in the Socrates Teaching Staff Mobility.
The Department of Translation and Interpreting (http://www.uab.cat/departament/traduccio/) is on the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting of the UAB. This faculty is the oldest in Spain and has been training translators and interpreters since 1972. It has been ranked first among other translator training centres in Spain for the quality of the teaching, the number of language combinations offered and the excellent installations. The faculty has been a pioneer in adapting university teaching to the ECTS model and is the UAB centre with most university exchange programmes. In 1992, the department started the first doctoral programme in Translation Studies in Spain (53 PhD thesis and 96 MA thesis defended since 1992). The department also offers postgraduate and MA programmes in audiovisual, legal, literary, Chinese-Spanish translation and IT applied to translation. The department has been a pioneer in developing software for teaching subtitling (Subtitul@m).
Role
UAB’s role in the project is to develop educational material for foreign language learning in audiovisual format. More precisely the team will develop at least 50 activities accompanied by lesson plans to be used by foreign language teachers and students. The activities are based on the idea of revoicing and captioning with different possibilities: same language subtitling (L2>L2), interlingual subtitling (L1>L2 or L2>L1), including or not standard-style subtitles, audio description, voice-over, etc. and various foreign languages (Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Portuguese and English) at various levels of foreign language (according to the CEFR). UAB will lead the pilot use of the produced activities (work package 5)
Other contributions to the project are to:
- contribute to the establishment of a conceptual framework for the use of revoicing and captioning using audiovisual material for foreign language learning.
- provide feedback for the development of the web platform.
- implement the activities in actual courses and provide a pilot use report.
- evaluate several activities from the point of view of both the tutor and the university students.
- disseminate and exploit the products of the project.
- collaborate with the following associate partners: the secondary schools: “Instituto de Enseñanza Secundaria (IES) Esteve Terradas i Illa”, “IES Benaguasil” and “Instituto Formación Profesional Juan Bosco”. We will guide and support a number of tutors who will in turn guide their students who attend existing face-to-face courses held at the partner universities (HE) and the associate partner institutions (schools).
- undertake all required administrative tasks, e.g. provide the necessary information for the progress and final reports.
- organise the final conference.
Regarding the operational and financial management of the project, the UAB holds an extensive experience in participating and managing international projects, especially in the frame of the European funded programmes, such as Lifelong Learning Programme. The Financial Services of the UAB presents a decentralized structure that enables professors taking part in an international project to manage their budget through an independent account by receiving administrative support from their Department.
