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Political press conferences, while playing a significant role in international communication by heads of state and government, are still largely underexplored in interpreting studies. More scholarly attention is needed, particularly to examine the interpreter’s mediating role in these uniquely constrained communicative settings. Drawing on narrative theory and Wadensjö’s model of renditions, this paper investigates the interpreter’s mediating role at a 2011 joint press conference with the American and Chinese Presidents, at that time Barack Obama and Hu Jintao respectively. Specifically, the study examines how the interpretation comprises reduced, expanded and summarized renditions of the speakers’ narratives, and how the resulting mediation can affect not only their image, but also the outcome of the diplomatic communication between their respective countries. Here, the interpreter’s performance is subject not only to his language competence, but also to a number of other factors. On the one hand, his mediation can be facilitated rather than restricted by the constraints of the setting where the interpreting occurs, such as technical problems and time limitations. On the other hand, the mediation can also reflect the interpreter’s institutional role and the public narratives within the socio-cultural context.

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High subtitle speed undoubtedly impacts the viewer experience. However, little is known about how fast subtitles might impact the reading of individual words. This article presents new findings on the effect of subtitle speed on viewers’ reading behavior using word-based eye-tracking measures with specific attention to word skipping and rereading. In multimodal reading situations such as reading subtitles in video, rereading allows people to correct for oculomotor error or comprehension failure during linguistic processing or integrate words with elements of the image to build a situation model of the video. However, the opportunity to reread words, to read the majority of the words in the subtitle and to read subtitles to completion, is likely to be compromised when subtitles are too fast. Participants watched videos with subtitles at 12, 20, and 28 characters per second (cps) while their eye movements were recorded. It was found that comprehension declined as speed increased. Eye movement records also showed that faster subtitles resulted in more incomplete reading of subtitles. Furthermore, increased speed also caused fewer words to be reread following both horizontal eye movements (likely resulting in reduced lexical processing) and vertical eye movements (which would likely reduce higher-level comprehension and integration).