 And hello, this is Lukas and I'm joined today by Dr. Serenella Masida. Hello, Serenella. Hi Lukas, thank you for inviting me. I'm a huge fan of ABT Masterclass. Thank you. We're very happy to have you here and perhaps don't need an introduction for many people but for those who are seeing you for the first time. Let's just say briefly that Dr. Serenella Masida is an Associate Professor of Audiovisual Translation at Roe-Humpton University. You're also a Serenella Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. You have published extensively on the topic of ABT and technology, as you're the author of several books as well as numerous papers on subtitling and audiovisual translation. Crucially, you're also a professional translator yourself and you're a member of several industry organizations and as an educator you teach courses on subtitling and audiovisual translation at Roe-Humpton University. We're very happy to have you here because you're also one of the key people involved in creating a certification for subtitles. Before we jump into the details on this, perhaps we could start by a more general issue of expertise. What does it mean to be an expert in subtitling and how do we know if somebody is an expert? It's a tricky question, isn't it? An expert in subtitling is an individual with, first of all, a high level of proficiency in both the source and target languages. As a set of cultural, linguistic, encyclopedic, technical, and then some skills there. Just to name a few competencies, let's call them competencies, a linguistic skill means that you muster the grammar, the syntax, use of language, vocabulary, fixed expressions, idioms of a language, the source, and the target language as well. This probably comes easy when you are bilingual, for example, or you've lived long enough in both countries, not just one. But there is also a cultural knowledge, which means that your translation skills are not enough because if you're subtitling a dialogue in a scene and you don't get the context, you're in trouble. I think that experts are curious people, are avid readers, fill-ups, they are knowledgeable individuals immersed in the history and the tradition and the culture, the politics, just name one aspect of a country. And then there's more, there are technical skills. So an expert is proficient in one or more subtitling editors, either desktop-based, cloud-based, have a good understanding of film editing, video encoding, video formatting, and so on, those extra bonus skills. And they are ideally tech-savvy, they are conversing with new technologies, artificial intelligence, machine translation, automatic speech recognition, and instead of succumbing to these new technologies, they have agency on them. What else? Time management, you need to have a system in place. That is efficient and allows you to work in such a way that you can meet tight deadlines and you have an efficient workflow. And if your workflow is efficient, you work faster. And if you work faster, you earn more. And this basically goes hand-in-hand with an understanding of the media localization industry, the context you're in. But writer skills, which is different from translating, you need to be able to write in a concise, accurate way because you need to convey an intended message of the source dialogue in such a way that you're staying the same thing, but in a different way. This I think is linked to the mastering of your own language. I think it's taken for granted sometimes that you master your own native language, but as a teacher, I find that some of my students at first struggle with this, and it's really important, not just being proficient in the target language. What else? Attention to detail. You need to have a keen eye for detail. You need to spot your errors or errors in the source material. If you're working from a master template, you need to be able to understand that something is wrong because the audio is different. Creativity, you need to find creative solutions to translate fixed expressions, idioms, jokes, a turn of phrase, and cultural references, right? So it's kind of a problem-solving, creative kind of skill. But there are so many. I could go on for hours and I will just stop here, I guess. Sure, that was exactly my impression that we could go on forever and enumerate these skills. And thank you for giving us such a great overview of different competences that the subtitle needs to master.