Audio subtitling: dubbing and voice-over effects and their impact on user experience

ABSTRACT

This article reports the outcome of an experiment in which 42 Spanish blind and partially sighted participants were exposed to two diverging audio subtitling strategies: audio subtitles with a voice-over effect and audio subtitles with a dubbing effect. Data on the users’ emotional responses were collected through a tactile and simplified version of the SAM questionnaire and psychophysiological recordings of electrodermal activity and heart rate. The results obtained from both methods do not show statistically significant differences between the two effects. However, results from the questionnaire proved that emotions were induced in the participants calling for more research on the topic and with the application of such methods.

KEYWORDS:

• Audiovisual translation
• media accessibility
• psychophysiology
• audio subtitling
• emotions

Acknowledgments

We must thank the association of persons with sight loss, B1 B2 B3 (https://www.b1b2b3.org/ca/) for their support during the experiments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Gonzalo Iturregui-Gallardo holds a B.A. in English and French Studies with minor in German from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and he was awarded a Santander Scholarship to study an M.A. in Translation Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. During his Bachelor and Master degrees he focused on the study of dubbing and its phonetic and linguistic aspects. He has shortly worked in theatre subtitling as well as legal and jurisdictional translation and is currently a member of the TransMedia Catalonia research group, where he collaborates in the project New Approaches to Accessibility (NEA). The Catalan Government has awarded him a Ph.D. grant and he is doing a PhD in Translation and Intercultural Studies at the UAB, focusing on the delivery and implementation of audio subtitles for the blind and visually impaired. His areas of interest are dubbing, subtitling, and media accessibility.

Dr. Anna Matamala is a full-time lecturer at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where she teaches audiovisual translation. She worked as an audiovisual translator for more than ten years for the Catalan television TVC and holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Her main interests are audiovisual translation, media accessibility and applied linguistics. She has published in international journals such as Meta, The Translator, Perspectives, Cadernos de Tradução, Translation Watch Quarterly, Catalan Journal of Linguistics, and is the co-author (with Pilar Orero and Eliana Franco) of Voice-over Translation: An Overview (Peter Lang, 2010), and co-editor of Listening to Subtitles (Peter Lang, 2010, with Pilar Orero), New Insights into Audiovisual Translation (Rodopi, 2010, with Jorge Díaz-Cintas and Josélia Neves), and Audiovisual Translation in Close-Up: Practical and Theoretical Approaches (Peter Lang, 2011, with A. Serban and J.-M. Lavaur).

Notes

1 https://vod.tvp.pl/website/wojenne-dziewczyny,28767487.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness [FFI2015-64038-P, MINECO/FEDER, UE]. This study is part of the project NEA (Nuevos Enfoques sobre Accesibilidad [New Approaches to Accessibility]) developed within the research group TransMedia Catalonia [2017SGR113]. Gonzalo Iturregui-Gallardo is also holder of a research FI scholarship from the Catalan Government [2016FI_B 00012].