About the Workshops

This innovative series of six experiential Italian workshops was designed and delivered by Dr. Francesca Nicora and Sveva Zafferri to a total of 115 students from the schools: Galway Educate Together Secondary School,  Coláiste Bhaille Chláir and St. Patrick's Comprehensive School. The workshops offered a unique combination of cultural discovery, language learning, and digital media literacy, giving students the opportunity to explore Italy not only through traditional classroom-format lesson plans, but through interactive, creative, and tech-enhanced tasks.

Discovering Hidden Italy

The workshop begins with cultural exploration, focusing on lesser-known Italian regions and hidden gems, starting with Abruzzo and Molise.. Students completed a reading-comprehension quiz to uncover authentic facts, traditions, landscapes, and curiosities, helping them understand that Italy is far more than its most famous cities.

To reinforce learning, students also completed an Italian-language quiz based on a humorous clip from the popular Italian TV series Love Bugs, where the protagonists discuss the same two regions. This provided a fun, authentic listening experience and introduced real-life conversational Italian.

 

This part of the workshop also introduced students to audiovisual translation, where they experimented with basic subtitling features using Aegisub, a professional subtitling tool. They worked on the same clip taken from Love Bugs, with Italian audio and English subtitles. The activity focused on raising awareness of how subtitles are created and on recognising the criteria that determine good subtitling quality. Through guided practice, students learned how to insert and edit subtitles, and were introduced to the key technical, translation and linguistic parameters used in professional subtitling — such as readability, timing, segmentation, line length, tone, and clarity.

Subtitling, Translation & AI Awareness

In the second part of the workshop, after being introduced to the quality standards that subtitles should meet, students engaged in a hands-on post-editing task, where they edited and improved AI-generated subtitles for a clip taken from the same TV-series Love Bugs. They were asked to compare AI-generated subtitles for the second clip to human-translated subtitles for the first clip and later post-edit the AI-translation to make it understandable for an English-speaking audience. This comparative activity helped them understand that subtitling is not merely a mechanical task, but one that requires interpretation, creativity, and cultural awareness.

Alongside this practical component, students participated in a critical discussion centred on Artificial Intelligence and its growing role in everyday life and in audiovisual translation. They reflected on benefits, risks, ethical considerations, and current limitations of AI tools, exploring how AI intersects with creativity, language learning, and digital citisenship.

What students gained

By the end of workshop, students had developed:

✔ Knowledge of Italian geography
✔ Listening and comprehension skills using real Italian media
✔ Practical experience in audiovisual translation and subtitling
✔ Awareness of professional digital tools (Aegisub)
✔ Critical thinking about AI, technology & media literacy
✔ Teamwork, creativity, and problem-solving skills

 

This workshop series demonstrates how language education thrives when it connects culture, technology, and critical thinking. Through hands-on tasks, real Italian media, and guided reflection, students were able to experience the language rather than simply study it!