In the modern world, we are surrounded by screens, captions, and moving images more than ever before. Subtitling is ubiquitous in many different forms and formats like TV broadcasting, DVD, cinema, and streaming services. Subtitling is a perfect tool to promote EU policy on language learning, linguistic diversity and multilingualism as well as a key element of making audiovisual culture accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Understanding the way people watch subtitled films has become a central concern for subtitling researchers in recent years. As more and more people watch subtitles on different devices and in different environments, there is a pressing need to verify the current subtitling standards, some of which were developed many years ago and were not based on empirical research.
In the SURE Project, we studied how people read subtitles depending on their speed (how fast subtitles appear and disappear) and text segmentation (the way the text is divided between the two lines in a subtitle). Appropriate subtitle speed and segmentation allow viewers to follow the text in the subtitles comfortably and to have enough time to look at the on-screen action. If subtitle speed is too fast or too slow, and segmentation does not adhere to linguistic rules, viewers may find it difficult to follow and understand the information contained in the subtitles. Today’s changing audiovisual landscape calls for more up-to-date research on how fast different groups of users can read subtitles and on whether text segmentation in subtitles has a direct impact on the reading process.
A combination of different research methods used in the SURE Project: eye tracking, a set of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, has enabled us to isolate the impact of subtitle speed and segmentation on the processing of subtitled videos modulated by different linguistic backgrounds of viewers. No work to date has investigated subtitle speeds and segmentation using such mixed methods approach. Our approach provided a unique research opportunity to determine that modern viewers are able to keep up with fast subtitles and that they prefer uncondensed subtitles when watching films in a language they are familiar with. We also found that people’s viewing experience depends on the language of the soundtrack and their familiarity with subtitling. Finally, we established that linguistic-based text segmentation in subtitles results in more efficient subtitle processing.
