Visual attention distribution in intralingual respeaking

Abstract

Respeaking is a method of producing real-time subtitles for live television programmes, enabling access to the media for people who are deaf, hard of hearing or who support their viewing with subtitles. Respeaking requires a set of skills akin to both interpreting and subtitling, including multitasking and management of concurrent sources of incoming information. In this chapter we present the results of an eye-tracking study on the visual attention of respeakers during an intralingual respeaking task (Polish to Polish). We tested 57 people while they were respeaking a 5-minute news programme. Participants also underwent a short proof-reading task. There were three groups of participants: interpreters, translators and a control group of people with no interpreting/translation experience. We examined the number of fixations and mean fixation duration on major screen areas: picture, subtitles, dictation area and subtitle panel. We found that translators who had experience in subtitling were able to manage their visual attention most efficiently as they fixated more often on key screen areas and their fixations were longer than in other groups. They also achieved the highest score on the proof-reading task, which suggest they could work in respeaking as editors.

A Comparative Study on the Effort of Human Translation and Post-Editing in Relation to Text Types: An Eye-Tracking and Key-Logging Experiment

“…Therefore, long fixations or multiple fixations on the same spot indicate increased cognitive effort (Miquel-Iriarte et al, 2012, pp. 263–264; Koponen, 2016, p. 25; Szarkowska et al, 2018, p. 189; Walker, 2018b, p. 227). Aside from fixation, there are other indicators of effort.…”

En más de un sentido: Multimodalidad y construcción de significados en traducción e interpretación

“…Her exploratory study sheds light on the broad contours of the subtitling profession in the Danish context and the details of the working practices of five subtitlers. Furthermore, Orrego-Carmona et al (2018: 152-153) reference studies by Pagano et al (2011), Hvelplund (2017) and Szarkowska et al (2018), which have explored the processes of subtitling, dubbing and intralingual respeaking respectively.…”