Speaker 1: Hello there, my name is Łukasz and I'm joined today by Agnieszka Szarkowska. Agnieszka is a professor at the University of Warsaw and Honorary Research Associate at University College London. Agnieszka, you dedicated your career to researching audiovisual translation and subtitling in particular. What do you do to actually know where people look when watching subtitles, how people are reading subtitles? How can we actually know that?

Speaker 2: Well, basically you can do two major things. You can ask them and then this may or may not be true because they may or may not remember, may or may not pay attention. Or you can try some more objective measures. For instance, we've been working with eye tracking a lot and eye tracker is basically a device that allows you to see where people are looking. So you show them film with subtitles, you can manipulate different reading speeds of these subtitles and then we are able to find out whether they have been able to read those

Speaker 1: subtitles at all. Sure, that sounds absolutely fascinating. So you mentioned this device, eye tracker. To a person who has never heard about it, how could you describe how this

Speaker 2: device works? Okay, this wasn't in the script. So yes, there are different types of eye trackers obviously and the ones that we have are very user friendly. They're called non-invasive. It's basically a panel that uses infrared light, this light shines some light that you as a viewer, as a participant, you don't see. But the eye tracker's camera sees that and thanks to the reflection of this infrared light, we can know precisely where and for how long people are looking at something. That is displayed on the screen. So for you as a participant, it looks like this. You sit at a computer, could be a laptop, could be simply a simple monitor and you just watch something on this screen and you don't even

Speaker 1: notice that there is an eye tracker there. Sure, so let me recap to make sure that they understand correctly. So thanks to this device, eye tracker, you're able to know where people are looking and for how long they are looking at this part of the image. That's right and we are

Speaker 2: trying to infer what that means, right? And we need to remember that the eye tracker only tells us where they looked and for how long. It doesn't tell us anything about what they think, right?

Speaker 1: So you later as a researcher, you're trying to analyse why people were looking there and

Speaker 2: how, why they spend so much time in this area. Yes, yes, generally the longer you look at some place, the longer your fixations are. Fixations are these moments when the eyes are relatively stable and when you're actually taking in some new information. So the longer you look at somewhere, we can infer that potentially this was either a more interesting thing or more difficult to process and then you'd need to follow that up with some more subjective questions or some other methods to triangulate. That means to put together

Speaker 1: different methods and see what comes out of it. Thank you for explaining that. So as subtitlers, we often wonder about reading speed. What is the reading speed that we should be using? You've spent approximately 20 years researching reading speed, right? So you seem to be the right person to ask this question and the question that people when they're doing subtitling for the first time, the question that I was asking myself, what reading speed I should use? What is

Speaker 2: the best reading speed? Yeah, that's an excellent question. What's the optimum reading speed? I go to those conferences, I talk to people, I talk to students and they are asking me, so what's the best reading speed? What's the most, the speed that we should use? And actually, this is a question that cannot be answered really. It's like the holy grail of subtitling industry and subtitling research as well. I understand why people want to have one number. For instance, if you're a company, you're basically looking for the number for the reading speed and characters per second to put in your style guide, for instance, right? As a subtitler, you need to put something in your subtitling software, so you need that one number. However, it's really impossible to say what this number should be because it depends on a number of factors. For instance, it depends on the audience, whether you are an adult proficient reader or whether your subtitles are meant for children, whether you're hearing or deaf or hard of hearing, right? That also depends on what actually people are saying because if we are watching some really specialized documentary with lots of difficult words, obviously, it would be recommended to go down with reading speed, whereas when the content is much easier, you can go up a bit. And I think the important thing that we need to remember is that what you have in the style guide and what you put as a subtitler in your subtitling software is the maximum reading speed, right? It's not if you have, I don't know, 17 or 20 CPS. It doesn't mean that your every subtitle should be that fast, right? Having said that, I think it's quite good that subtitles should have some, well, similar reading speeds, consistent speeds, so that you don't have a lot of differences. And one final thought, I think it's also impossible to state what the reading speed should be because you have different types of content. I already mentioned specialized language, but it also really depends on how much is going on on the screen, right? If you just have two characters like us talking heads talking, it's not much of an issue, but if you have a lot of things that are going on on the screen that you want people to actually have a look at, right? People go to the cinema or watch films not to see your subtitles, right? They just want to see whatever is on screen. So, that also depends. So, I cannot answer, I'm afraid. But anyway, you've given us so much

Speaker 1: useful information. So, let's try to recap and make sure that we can remember all of it. So, first of all, you're saying that reading speed depends on the number of factors. So, when I'm thinking as a subtitle, which reading speed I should use. So, you basically need to think for

Speaker 2: whom, right? You're translating who your audience is, what the content is, right? Where they're going to watch it. For instance, if they're in the cinema, nothing is going to distract them. Probably, if it's content on television, perhaps you might want to go down with your reading speed

Speaker 1: a bit. Sure. So, who your audience is and here we need to take into account things like their age, their education and you mentioned the hearing status, whether somebody is a hearing person or a hard of hearing person. You also mentioned, Agnieszka, that it depends on the content. So, now we're two talking heads, right? In this video, not much going on. That's right. So,

Speaker 2: if you're reading subtitles, there's not much that you are going to miss, right? But if you're working with some action-packed film, you would really want people to actually look at the image.

Speaker 1: So, action is important, right? Yes. I was just thinking about that these fast-paced action movies where there's really so much going on and people will need more attention on the image and subtitles should not distract them that much from what's going on in the image. Okay. So, we mentioned the audience, we mentioned the content. Does it also depend on the language, the language of the film and how the audience is familiar with this language or not?

Speaker 2: Well, I suppose it makes a big difference if you are familiar with the language of the soundtrack, right? I'm not sure if that's what you're asking. But with so much English language content that we've had so far, so the situation that is quite common is that people can understand the language of the audio and then, and you know that yourselves probably, right? You start comparing what you can hear in the dialogues, what the characters are saying with the subtitles and then you're, if you know the language, you might be looking for unconsciously some discrepancies, right? And then you're not very happy about that. Yes, but that of course differs when I watch, I don't know, a Korean film, right? Some non-English content or content that we are not familiar with. Obviously, you would want to have some lower reading speed because you can't take in any useful or meaningful information from the verbal content of the dialogue. And that's

Speaker 1: because you just don't understand that language. You don't understand, you can try to get something

Speaker 2: from the intonation or from some other sounds the characters are making, but still you just don't get it, right? So, the only meaningful information that you have is actually in the

Speaker 1: subtitles. So, summing up, if the audience is familiar with the language of the film and understands it to some degree, reading speed could be a bit higher, whereas if this is a language that the audience in its majority will not understand, the reading speed should be lower. That's right, that's what we found in our study, yes. Okay, that's very interesting, but the bottom line for a subtitler is what should I set in my subtitling tool? Whatever your company tells you, they pay you, you need to...

Speaker 2: Although, no, I have to say I'm wrong to say that. There needs to be some common sense, right? So, if your company tells you, okay, let's do, I don't know, 35 or 40 characters per second, then perhaps it's time for you to say, really, no, let's think about it. That's not

Speaker 1: really the speed that people will be able to follow. Okay, so usually as a subtitler you will receive this information from the company you're working for. So, you will have a style guide prepared by the company that will say, use this reading speed, okay? But can we give people the range of reading speeds which are mostly used on the market today? Yes, yes. So, roughly speaking,

Speaker 2: the speed that we have on the market, that of course depends on the country and all those different factors that we already mentioned, that somewhere between 12 to 20 characters per second, I think most of the style guides, they fall into this range and that's an okay range, depending

Speaker 1: again on all those factors. Okay, so our advice would be never to go above 20 characters per

Speaker 2: second. That's already very fast. That is quite fast, that's true, and our research shows that some people are able to follow subtitles up to 20 characters per second. However, there was some research done in Australia by Professor Jan-Louis Kruger, who also tested another speed, 28 characters per second, and he found this speed is much too fast for people to be able to follow. So, the results that we have currently show that at 20, most people can still cope. Sure. So, the

Speaker 1: bottom line for us, never go above 20 characters per second, and I think we should also remember that some countries have very strong traditions of lower reading speeds. So, there might be countries

Speaker 2: with 12 characters per second, right? That's right, that's right. Some Scandinavian countries with long-standing subtitling traditions, they traditionally have worked with very low, what seems to be low now, reading speeds like 10 to 12 characters per second, and that's something that we haven't mentioned yet, that of course lower reading speeds imply higher text reduction, and that's the key point in subtitling. So, I think that's also the reason why reading speeds, or the increase in reading speeds, has caused so much controversy on the market, because there have been those traditional subtitling markets, countries, Scandinavian countries, as I mentioned, that have always condensed a lot, and their audiences are used to that, and that's part of their professional ethics as well, that this is how subtitling is done, you condense a lot. That, of course, depends on the speed of the characters, the speech rate, all the different factors, but that's their ethics. And then, a couple of years ago, some new companies entered the market, or there have been changes in style guides, and with increases in reading speeds, so there has been a discussion going on, whether it's good or bad, whether it's good subtitling, good quality or not, and what does it really mean, and who's the right to say. So, you mentioned condensation, let's

Speaker 1: perhaps unwrap that for our students. So, the lower reading speed, the less text we can actually have in a subtitle, the less letters will fit, right? That's right, so you can have with lower

Speaker 2: reading speeds, let's say 12 characters per second, that's quite a low reading speed, so you, as a subtitler, what you have to do, you have to condense the text, so you can insert fewer characters

Speaker 1: with a lower reading speed. Okay, thank you for this, Agnieszka, it's been great talking to you. Thank you.