Post-editing machine translated subtitles: examining the effects of non-verbal input on student translators’ effort

ABSTRACT

Despite the potential productivity benefits of post-editing machine-translated outputs, post-editing practices have rarely been integrated into the workflow of subtitle production. This study examines the usefulness of employing post-editing methods during the subtitle production process by comparing student translators’ translations to post-editing machine-translated subtitles. The amount of non-verbal input originating from the provided audiovisual materials was also included as an independent variable to identify its potential effect on the subtitle post-editing process. An experiment was then conducted that utilized an English-Chinese language pair and eye-tracking and keystroke-logging techniques to estimate student translators’ effort during both translation and post-editing processes. The results of the study reveal that there is a significantly shorter production duration and fewer keystrokes typed during the post-editing process, with texts that contained increased non-verbal input proving to be significantly less cognitively demanding as evidenced by this study’s observations of the fixation count and the overall duration.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-editing effort
• subtitle production
• non-verbal input
• multimodality

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Word frequency was calculated based on BNC: https://www.lextutor.ca/vp/comp/

2 Please see http://www.catticenter.com/wzjs/452 (CATTI) and https://www.ielts.org/ (IELTS) for more information.

3 Please see https://www.tobiipro.com/siteassets/tobii-pro/user-manuals/tobii-pro-x2-60-eye-tracker-user-manual.pdf/?v=1.0.3 for details concerning the Tobii X2-60 eye-tracker.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences: [Grant Number 19BYY103]; National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science: [Grant Number 19BYY103].

Notes on contributors

Jie Huang

Jie Huang is a PhD candidate in the School of Foreign Languages at Renmin University of China. Her research interests include cognitive processes of translation, Machine Translation post-editing and audiovisual translation. She is conducting research on the cognitive process of subtitle translation, focusing on multimodality and semiotic cohesion.

Jianhua Wang

Jianhua Wang is a professor of translation studies at the School of Foreign Languages in Renmin University of China. He has published on a variety of research topics as Psychology of Interpreting, A Multimodal Framework of Cultural Translation and Cognitive Studies on AI Interpreting. Some of his current research areas include cognitive process researches on subtitling translation, virtual reality studies on interpreting.