Subtitling speed in Media Accessibility research: some methodological considerations

ABSTRACT

Media Accessibility researchers who analyze existing subtitled materials or who create them in the lab for experimental purposes often report on the average subtitling speed of their samples as a measure to describe the rate at which their materials were delivered to viewers. However, they not always describe the methodology behind their calculations, which may be problematic because the literature shows no uniformity in the way that the average subtitling speed is estimated. This paper delves into the notion of average subtitling speed as used in Media Accessibility research. It first looks at the role of subtitling speed in guidelines issued by the industry and regulators. Then it moves on to explore how the average subtitling speed is approached in the scholarly literature, which shows three different methods to calculate this parameter. The comparability and interchangeability of those methods is then analyzed from a statistical standpoint. A reflection follows on the use of the average subtitling speed as a measure to inform about the speed of subtitling samples, before concluding with some methodological recommendations that may help improve the way that the average subtitling speed is reported in scholarly works.

KEYWORDS:

• Subtitling speed
• subtitling rate
• methodology
• media accessibility

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Pablo Romero-Fresco for sharing data from the Ofcom project, which we used in our statistical analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Subtitling speed may be measured in several units, words per minute and characters per second being the two most frequently used.

2 Media Accessibility is understood in this paper to encompass SDH and closed captioning.

3 The examples included in the tables of this paper do not show real subtitles, but modified samples that have been adapted for the sake of clarity (for instance, to obtain whole WPM values).

4 For the sake of clarity, only calculations in wpm will be included in this paper. However, the same reasoning would apply if cps were the unit of choice.

5 Multiple replicates could be used, for instance, to compare two methods to measure sugar levels in the blood. Since these fluctuate, B&A would consider the sugar levels as measured by each method at different times of the day.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nazaret Fresno

Nazaret Fresno holds a PhD in Translation and Cross-cultural Studies, as well as an MA in Audiovisual Translation and an MA in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation. She is an Assistant Professor of Translation and Interpreting at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, in the US, and her research interests include Audiovisual Translation, Media Accessibility (subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing and audio description), and website localization.

Katarzyna Sepielak

Katarzyna Sepielak holds a PhD in Translation and Cross-cultural Studies from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. She earned a master’s degree in Sociology, a master’s degree in Spanish, and a master’s degree in Translation, Interpreting and Cross-cultural Studies. Her research focuses on cross-cultural communication, emergency communication, accessibility, and audiovisual translation. She is currently a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA.