Dr. Alina Karakanta is an Assistant Professor in Machine Translation at Leiden University and an expert in Automatic Subtitling. Her interdisciplinary background spans translation studies, computational linguistics and media accessibility. Her current research investigates AI suggestions in post-editing workflows, with a special focus on multimedia localization. She conducts user studies to explore the impact of AI technologies on subtitlers’ productivity, viewers’ reception and accessibility literacy. Her academic contributions include journal articles, book chapters, and presentations at top-tier conferences, enriching the fields of MT and audiovisual translation.

She earned her PhD in Neural Machine Translation from the University of Trento and Fondazione Bruno Kessler on the topic of Automatic subtitling. Working at the forefront of the field, she developed the first automatic subtitling models, collected subtitle corpora and introduced new evaluation metrics tailored to audiovisual content. Earlier in her career, Alina contributed to projects on MT for low-resource languages, variation in translation, and modelling human translation at Saarland University.

With over a decade’s experience as a freelance translator and, more recently, as MT consultant helping LSPs integrate AI into their workflows, she has a unique perspective of translators’ needs and industry demands.

A passionate educator, Dr. Karakanta teaches BA and MA students in linguistics and translation studies, bringing cutting-edge AI insights into the classroom. In her teaching, she blends practical insights from her professional experience with theoretical knowledge from her research on automatic subtitling, speech translation, evaluation metrics, and accessibility-driven language technologies.