Alina Karakanta
Assistant professor
- Name
- Dr. A. Karakanta
- Telephone
- +31 71 527 2978
- a.karakanta@hum.leidenuniv.nl
- ORCID iD
- 0000-0002-1029-1337
I am an Assistant Professor in Machine Translation at the Leiden Centre for Linguistics. My research navigates disciplinary boundaries between translation studies, computational linguistics and machine learning, focusing on automatic subtitling, and language technologies for audiovisual translation and media accessibility.
More information about Alina Karakanta
Research
I am conducting research on speech and machine translation for audiovisual content and media accessibility. I obtained my PhD in Neural Machine Translation from the University of Trento on the topic of Automatic Subtitling. My thesis contributions covered multimodal data collection, implementation of speech and machine translation models and new metrics for evaluating subtitling-specific aspects. Previously, I was involved in research projects focusing on exploring variation in translation and interpreting, and on MT for low-resource languages.
Grants and awards
I received an EAMT 2021 Student grant for the project 'Towards a methodology for evaluating automatic subtitling'. Goal of the project was to research post-editing in automatic subtitling and the correlation of post-editing effort with automatic MT evaluation metrics.
Curriculum Vitae
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
- 2022-today Machine translation consultant, Freelancer.
- 2014-2023 Official Translator and Post-Editor EL, RO, EN, DE, Freelancer
- 2019-2022 Machine Translation Researcher at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy. Speech and Machine Translation for Audiovisual Content/
- 2017-2018 Research Assistant at the Dept. Language Science & Technology, Universität des Saarlandes. SFB-1102/B7: Modelling human translation with a noisy channel
EDUCATION
- 2022 - PhD Information Engineering & Computer Science. Fondazione Bruno Kessler/ University of Trento. Trento, Italy
Thesis: Automatic Subtitling: A new Paradigm - 2023 - MA Accessibility to Media, Arts & Culture. University of Macerata. Online/Macerata, Italy
- 2017 - MSc Language Science & Technology. Saarland University. Saarbrücken, Germany
- 2023 - BA Interpreting studies. Ionian University. Corfu, Greece
- 2014 - BA Translation studies. Ionian University. Corfu, Greece
Selected publications
JOURNAL ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS
• Karakanta, Alina and David Orrego-Carmona (2023). “Subtitling in Transition: the case of TED talks”. In: Translation in Transition: Bridging Human and Machine Intelligence. American Translators Association series. John Benjamins.
• Papi, S., Gaido, M., Karakanta, A., Cettolo, M., Negri, M., & Turchi, M. (2023). Direct speech translation for automatic subtitling. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 11, 1355-1376.
• Karakanta, Alina (2022). “Experimental research in automatic subtitling: At the crossroads between Machine Translation and Audiovisual Translation”. In: Translation Spaces. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ ts.21021.kar.
• Teich, Elke, José Martínez Martínez, and Alina Karakanta (2020). “Translation, information theory and cognition”. In: The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Cognition. Ed. by Fabio Alves and Arnt Lykke Jakobsen. London: Routledge. Chap. 20. ISBN: 9781138037007.
• Karakanta, Alina, Jon Dehdari, and Josef van Genabith (2018). “Neural machine translation for low-resource languages without parallel corpora”. In: Machine Translation 32.1, pp. 167–189. DOI: 10.1007/s10590-017-9203-5.
CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
• Karakanta, Alina, Luisa Bentivogli, Mauro Cettolo, Matteo Negri, and Marco Turchi (2022). “Post-editing in Automatic Subtitling: A Subtitlers’ perspective”. In: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation. Ghent, Belgium: European Association for Machine Translation, pp. 259–268. URL: https://aclanthology.org/2022.eamt-1.29.
• Karakanta, Alina, Matteo Negri, and Marco Turchi (2020). “Is 42 the Answer to Everything in Subtitling-oriented Speech Translation?” In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation. Online: Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 209-219.
• Karakanta, Alina, Supratik Bhattacharya, Shravan Nayak, Timo Baumann, Matteo Negri, and Marco Turchi (2020). “The Two Shades of Dubbing in Neural Machine Translation”. In: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Barcelona, (Online): International Committee on Computational Linguistics, pp. 4327–4333.
Assistant professor
- Faculty of Humanities
- Leiden Univ Centre for Linguistics
- LUCL English
- Debess I.N., Karakanta A. & Scalvini B. (2025), What’s wrong with this translation?: Simplifying error annotation for crowd evaluation. Einarsson H., Simonsen A. & Nielsen D.S. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 1st NB-REAL workshop 2025: Nordic-Baltic responsible evaluation and alignment of language models. : The University of Tartu Library. 42-47.
- Karakanta A., Nas M.O. & Dorst A.G. (2025), Metaphors in literary machine translation: close but no cigar?. Bouillon P., Gerlach J., Girletti S., Volkart L., Rubino R., Sennrich R., Farinha A.C., Gaido M., Daems J., Kenny D., Moniz H. & Szoc S. (Eds.), Proceedings of machine translation summit XX: volume 1. Machine Translation Summit XX 23 June 2025 - 27 June 2025. Geneva: European Association for Machine Translation. 276–286.
- Mondello A., Rasane S., Karakanta A. & Casanellas L. (2024), Leveraging {AI} technologies for enhanced multimedia localization. Martindale M., Campbell J., Savenkov K. & Goel S (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Volume 2: Presentations). . Chicago: Association for Machine Translation in the Americas. 145--151.
- Karakanta A., Cettolo M., Negri M. & Bentivogli L. (2024), Evaluating automatic subtitling: correlating post-editing effort and automatic metrics, Proceedings of LREC-COLING 2024. . Torino: ELRA and ICCL. 6363--6369.
- Karakanta A. & Orrego-Carmona D. (2023), Chapter 7: subtitling in transition. In: Lacruz I. (Ed.), Translation in transition: human and machine intelligence: John Benjamins. 130–156.
- Papi S., Gaido M., Karakanta A., Cettolo M., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2023), Direct speech translation for automatic subtitling, Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 11: 1355-1376.
- Karakanta A. (2022), Experimental research in automatic subtitling, Translation Spaces 11(1): 89-112.
- Papi S., Karakanta A., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2022), Dodging the data bottleneck: automatic subtitling with automatically segmented ST corpora, Proceedings of the 2nd AACL-IJCNLP (Volume 2: Short papers). 480-487.
- Karakanta A., Bentivogli L., Cettolo M., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2022), Post-editing in automatic subtitling: a subtitlers' perspective, Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference of the European Association for machine translation. : European association for machine translation. 261-270.
- Karakanta A., Bentivogli L., Cettolo M., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2022), Towards a methodology for evaluating automatic subtitling, Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference of the European association for machine translation. : European Association for Machine Translation. 333-334.
- Bentivogli L., Cettolo M., Gaido M., Karakanta A., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2022), Extending the Mu{ST}-C corpus for a comparative evaluation of speech translation technology, Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference of the European association for machine translation. : European Association for Machine Translation. 359-360.
- Karakanta A., Buet F., Cettolo M. & Yvon F. (2022), Evaluating subtitle segmentation for end-to-end generation systems, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022). 3069-3078.
- Przybyl H., Karakanta A., Menzel K. & Teich E. (2022), Exploring linguistic variation in mediated discourse: translation vs. interpreting. In: , Mediated discourse at the European parliament: empirical investigations. Berlin: Language Science Press. 191-218.
- Karakanta A., Gaido M., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2021), Between flexibility and consistency: joint generation of captions and subtitles. Federico M., Waibel A., Marta R., Costa-jussà J.H., Stuker S. & Salesky E. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th international conference on spoken language translation: IWSLT 2021. . Bangkok: Association for computational linguistics. 215-225.
- Bentivogli L., Cettolo M., Gaido M., Karakanta A., Martinelli A., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2021), Cascade versus direct speech translation: do the differences still make a difference?, Proceedings of the 59th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics and the 11th international joint conference on natural language processing: Volume 1: long papers. : Association for computational linguistics. 2873-2887.
- Karakanta A., Przybyl H. & Teich E. (2021), Chapter 12: exploring variation in translation with probabilistic language models. In: Lavid-López J., Maíz-Arévalo C. & Rafael J. (Eds.), Corpora in translation and contrastive research in the Digital Age: recent advances and explorations: John Benjamins. 307–323.
- Karakanta A., Papi S., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2021), Simultaneous speech translation for live subtitling: from delay to display, Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Automatic Spoken Language Translation in Real-World Settings (ASLTRW). : Association for Machine Translation in the Americas. 35-48.
- Karakanta A., Przybyl H. & Teich E. (2021), Exploring variation in translation with probabilistic language models. In: Lavid-López J., Maíz-Arévalo C. & Zamorano-Mansilla J.R. (Eds.), Corpora in translation and contrastive research in the digital age: Recent advances and explorations. Benjamins Translation Library no. 158. Amsterdam: Benjamins Translation Library. 307-323.
- Karakanta A., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2020), Is 42 the answer to everything in subtitling-oriented speech translation?. Federico M., Waibel A., Knight K., Nakamura S., Ney H., Niehues J., Stüker S., Wu D., Mariani J. & Yvon F. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation. The 17th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation 9 July 2020 - 10 July 2020: Association for Computational Linguistics. 209-219.
- Karakanta A., Bhattacharya S., Nayak S., Baumann T., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2020), The two shades of dubbing in neural machine translation. Scott D., Bel N. & Zong C. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th international conference on computational linguistics. . Barcelona: International Committee on Computational Linguistics. 4327-4333.
- Nayak S., Baumann T., Bhattacharya S., Karakanta A., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2020), See me speaking?: Differentiating on whether words are spoken on screen or off to optimize machine dubbing, Companion publication of the 2020 international conference on multimodal interaction. . New York: Association for computing machinery. 130-134.
- Karakanta A., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2020), Point break: surfing heterogeneous data for subtitle segmentation. Dell'Orletta F., Monti J. & Tamburini F. (Eds.), Seventh Italian conference on computational linguistics. . Torino: Accademia university press. 236-242.
- Karakanta A., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2020), MuST-Cinema: a speech-to-subtitles corpus, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020). . Paris: European Language Resources Association. 3727--3737.
- Teich E., Martínez J.M. & Karakanta A. (2020), Translation, information theory and cognition. In: Alves F. & Jakobsen A.L. (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of translation and cognition. London: Routledge. 360-375.
- Karakanta A., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2020), Towards automatic subtitling: assessing the quality of old and new resources, IJCoL. Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics 6(1): 63-76.
- Karakanta A., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2019), Are subtitlingcorpora really subtitle-like?. Bernardi R., Navigli R. & Semeraro G. (Eds.), Sixth Italian conference on computational linguistics. Sixth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics 13 November 2019 - 15 November 2019. Bari: CLiC-It.
- Karakanta A., Ojha A.K., Liu C., Washington J., Oco N., Lakew S.M., Malykh V. & Zhao X. (Eds.) (2019), Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on technologies for MT of low resource languages. Dublin: European association for machine translation.
- Surafel M.L., Karakanta A., Federico M., Negri M. & Turchi M. (2019), Adapting multilingual neural machine translation to unseen languages, Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT). . Hong Kong: Special Interest Group on Spoken Language Translation.
- Karakanta A., Dehdari J. & Genabith J. van (2018), Neural machine translation for low-resource languages without parallel corpora, Machine Translation 32(1-2): 167-189.
- Karakanta A., Dehdari J. & Genabith J. van (2018), Neural machine translation for low-resource languages without parallel corpora, Machine Translation 32(1): 167--189.
- Currey A., Karakanta A. & Dehdari J. (2016), Using related languages to enhance statistical language models. Andreas J., Choi E. & Lazaridou A. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2016 conference of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics: Student research workshop. . San Diego: ACL. 24--31.
- Freelance translator