Photos by Elisa Von Brockdorff For the European Commission
A conference on Niktbu g魔al Kul魔add: Inclusive language and accessible content: the state of play in Malta, was held on Saturday 2 December 2023 in the Aula Magna of the Valletta Campus. It was organised by the Directorate General for Translation of the European Commission Representation in Malta, in collaboration with the departments of Maltese and Translation, Terminology and Interpreting Studies of the Faculty of Arts.
The opening speech, delivered by the European Commissioner for Equality Dr Helena Dalli, was followed by keynote speaker Prof. Jorge D铆az Cintas and the presentations of Dr Giselle Spiteri Miggiani and Romario Sciberras. Prof. D铆az Cintas, a pioneer in audiovisual translation, spoke about sensitive language and the emergence of social biases in translation, even when such biases are missing in the source language.
Romario Sciberras, an MA student of the Department of Maltese, spoke about the challenges that speakers of Maltese might face when using gender neutral language. He explained why the binary gender system in Maltese might exclude individuals who identify outside the dominant gender binary. The challenges include the verbal conjugation and pronominal suffixes in the third person singular, lexically gendered nouns and nouns which lack a fixed grammatical gender, and the participles in the singular. Sciberras noted that this very grammatical system of Maltese offers gender neutral alternatives, and some of these linguistic strategies are possible because of the existence of the binary system within the language. Such alternatives should not be treated as normative rules, primarily because different strategies apply in different contexts. Sciberras distinguished between the syntactic context and pragmatic context, which includes the political stance a speaker takes when speaking in particular circumstances.
Dr Spiteri Miggiani focused on audiovisual accessibility in the media and the arts through translation in the Maltese context. She referred to numerous resources for non-sighted and deaf individuals, such as subtitles and audio descriptions available for everyone in local museums, which are developed by Maltese trained professionals. David Schembri, from the European Commission's Directorate-General of Translation, interviewed Loran Ripard Xuereb who is a member of the Deaf People Association Malta. Ripard Xuereb spoke about his own experience of accessibility to audiovisual content.
Between the two sets of presentations, there were two workshops: Thomas Pace and Mark Paul Vella led a workshop about "plain language", while Joseph Buttigieg and Carmen Carabott led a practical discussion about strategies for inclusive writing and translation in Maltese.
Most of the proceedings were in Maltese. The organisers provided simultaneous interpretation to non-Maltese speakers.
