AVT Masterclass

Meet your instructors

Prof. Agnieszka Szarkowska is a researcher and translator trainer, academic teacher and audiovisual translation consultant. Agnieszka works in the Institute of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warsaw, leads the research group Audiovisual Translation Lab (AVT Lab), and is also an Honorary Research Associate at University College London. With over 20 years of hands-on teaching experience, Agnieszka has trained hundreds of students internationally to become high-quality professionals in the audiovisual translation industry. Agnieszka is the author of over 70 publications on audiovisual translation and principal investigator of several research projects. She is also a member of the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (ESIST), European Society for Translation Studies (EST) and an honorary member of the Polish Audiovisual Translators Association (STAW).

Meet your instructors

Łukasz Dutka is an audiovisual translator, subtitling trainer and expert in media accessibility. He's one of the founders of AVT Masterclass, a former director of the Global Alliance of Speech-to-Text Captioning, and a member of the Management Board of Dostepni.eu, an accessibility services provider. He studied applied linguistics as well as comparative literature. In 2012, he became an in-house subtitler for Polish public broadcaster and was responsible for SDH subtitling and semi-live subtitling of news broadcasts. As a member of Dostepni.eu team, he pioneered live subtitling through respeaking in Poland with the first accessible political and social events in 2013, first interlingual live subtitling in 2015 and first Polish television broadcast with live subtitling through respeaking in 2017. Since 2012, he has worked as a freelance subtitler and QC'er for leading localization companies, including working on many high-level titles. In 2019, he helped set up a live subtitling unit for Polsat, a leading TV broadcaster in Poland. He has nine years of experience in running training programmes for companies as well as teaching university-level courses on audiovisual translation, subtitling, subtitling for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, and interpreting. He is a member of the Polish Association of Audiovisual Translators, the University of Warsaw Audiovisual Translation Lab (AVT Lab), European Society for Translation Studies (EST) and European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (ESIST). Born by the mountains, he now lives by the ocean in a multilingual family that speaks Polish, English, Spanish, Italian, Swedish and Portuguese. He's a passionate movie-goer, reader, swimmer, chocolate-eater and a coffee addict.