The impact of visual information and translation experience on subtitling effort: a pilot study

The subtitling process remains an uncharted territory in audiovisual translation research, particularly regarding the impact of visual information on the subtitling effort across different translation experience levels. This study involved 30 participants, including 10 professional subtitlers, 10 translation students and 10 non-translation students. Eye tracking and keylogging were used to assess the temporal, technical, and cognitive effort in English – Chinese subtitling with and without visual information. Participants’ written translation and subtitling experience was collected by questionnaires. The results reveal that visual information significantly reduces cognitive effort in processing both source and target texts, but slightly affects temporal and technical effort. Subtitling experience substantially decreased all three efforts, whereas written translation experience only improved technical effort. Interaction effects show that translation students, trained primarily in written translation, could benefit from visual information in reducing keystrokes, but exhibited rather increased average fixation durations in the source text. These results identify the explanatory boundaries of both Dual Coding Theory and Limited Capacity Information Processing Theory in the context of subtitling. The study highlights the limitations of conventional written translation training in preparing students for multimodal subtitling tasks and underscores the need to integrate visual information processing skills into subtitling pedagogy.