16th International Conference on Live Subtitling and Speech-To-Text Interpreting (ICoLS) – Leeds, 4 July 2025
After the success of the 8th International Symposium on Live Subtitling held in Barcelona in 2023, and the 7th European Conference on Speech-To-Text Interpreting (ECOS) held in Athens 2024, the scientific committees of the two event series have decided to join forces. The University of Leeds and the University of Surrey have accepted the challenge and are proud to announce the 16th International Conference on Live Subtitling and Speech-To-Text Interpreting (ICoLS), to be held in Leeds on 4th July 2025.
Live Subtitling and Speech-To-Text Interpreting have always been characterised by an evolving scenario closely related to technologies, with transdisciplinary collaborations between and across many fields, like Translation Studies, Interpreting Studies, Media Accessibility, Deaf Studies, Cognitive Science, Engineering, Social Sciences, and so forth.
This has led to Live Subtitling and Speech-To-Text Interpreting gaining increasing recognition and becoming the focus of conferences, academic and vocational courses, research studies, scientific and professional publications, national and international associations, projects, and networks.
In this context, both the International Symposium of Live Subtitling and the European Conference of Speech-To-Text Interpreting have played pivotal roles by bringing together professionals, users, trainers, and researchers, and fostering discussions that have benefited all parties involved, as evidenced by the ongoing high number of joint academic and professional research projects.
However, we cannot ignore that AI continues to revolutionize many fields, with Live Subtitling and Speech-To-Text Interpreting being no exception. AI-based systems are increasingly used by major institutions such as the European Broadcasting Union and the European Parliament, with results that look very positive, especially for word-for-word transcripts of well-enunciated speeches in high-resource languages like English.
As we head towards fully automated solutions, critical questions arise:
The live subtitling symposium has always been an important meeting point for professionals, users, trainers, and researchers. It is expected to serve as a platform to exchange current training, new working practices, and innovative research projects. For this reason, the scientific committee welcomes proposals about the following topics, but not limited to:
- What will be the impact on the role of human professionals in this field?
- Are Live Subtitling and Speech-to-Text Interpreting dead?
- Does it make sense to continue training would-be professionals into these fields?
- Is there still room for humans in the new workflows?
- How can human-AI collaboration be optimised in these practices?
- How effectively accurate and reliable are AI-based solutions in general?
- How effective are AI-based solutions in less-resourced languages or in those contexts where verbatim texts do not meet the users’ needs and expectations?
- What role will users play in this ever-evolving scenario?
- How do users experience live texts generated by humans and/or AI?
ICoLS 16 will take place following the 11th EST Congress, serving as a platform to exchange views on all of the above questions. This event will enable professionals, users, technology experts, institutions, and academics to share their knowledge about current training, new working practices, and innovative research projects.
Key deadlines
- Submission of proposals: 31 January 2025
- Notification of rejection/acceptance: 28 February 2025
- Conference: 4 July 2025