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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Measuring Effort in Subprocesses of Subtitling

subject

description

There has been noticeable growth in the use and production of intralingual and interlingual subtitles due to technological advances and accessibility legislation. While the reception of subtitles has been increasingly studied over the years, there are only a few empirical studies that investigate the process of subtitling. This contribution gives initial results from a study that investigates the impact of reference material during post-editing of NMT of audiovisual content via language. The focus is on transcription and translation processes, the two main subprocesses of the complex task of interlingual subtitling. Applying well-established methods from TPR, key-logging and eye tracking, this study takes a first look at how the integration of language technology, specifically how NMT impacts these subprocesses when used in an indirect translation or pivot setup. In the study, 25 professional subtitlers and translation students were recorded working in three different conditions when post-editing the German NMT output of Swedish movie excerpts. Results evaluate the impact of post-editing, with and without English reference script and/or original Swedish video, on temporal, technical, and cognitive effort which is estimated with established measures based on gaze, typing, and session duration data. All sessions were recorded with Translog-II and eye tracking which to the author’s knowledge has not been applied to an audiovisual context yet apart from Huang and Carl (this volume, chapter “Word-Based Human Edit Rate (WHER) as an Indicator of Post-editing Effort”).