In participating at the UK Council on Deafness Annual Conference on November 20th, Red Bee Media is showcasing the company’s innovative work in live sign language translation for broadcast TV. As the only national provider of live British Sign Language (BSL) services for news programs, and with a unique solution developed over 8 years, Red Bee Media is combining technical innovation and expert translators to deliver a sign language service for live news & event broadcasts. With the setup, for the first time Red Bee Media can enable Deaf translators to work on live programs.
Live sign language translation has traditionally needed to be provided by hearing interpreters; through technical innovation and practical experimentation, Red Bee Media has developed a groundbreaking solution for these live services to be provided by Deaf translators as well.
The process is simple yet technically advanced, leveraging Red Bee Media Platforms Subito and InterSub. Live captions are first created by a captioner re-speaking via Subito (Red Bee Media’s live captioning platform), whilst listening to a low latency audio feed of the broadcast. These captions are then reformatted through InterSub (a tool created to deliver real-time transcripts in non-broadcast environments) and presented on the studio teleprompter used by the translator to provide sign language translation on screen.