This is the first volume to deal specifically with the quality of subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH) in Europe, with contributions from the UK, Spain, Italy, Poland, Denmark, France and Germany. Drawing on the results of the EU-funded project DTV4ALL, the book looks at the issue of quality in the reception of SDH in Europe as a combination of three factors: what viewers think about SDH, how they understand these subtitles and how they view them. The viewers’ preferences have been obtained through questionnaires and their comprehension has been analysed with tests, involving clips with SDH and questions. The viewers’ perception has been measured with eye-tracking technology, involving the analysis of 71,070 subtitles in what is so far the largest international eye-tracking study on subtitling. With this research, we have sought to obtain both subjective (preferences) and objective (comprehension and perception) data that can inform national guidelines on SDH. The book also introduces the notion of viewing speed and points to the existence of certain universals of SDH and subtitling that can contribute to advance our understanding of how different types of viewers from different nationalities view, process and understand subtitles as a means to access audiovisual content.

Contents: Viewer’s opinion of SDH in Europe – Long Questionnaire in Denmark, Poland, Italy, Spain, UK, France, Germany – Viewers’ comprehension and perception of SDH in Europe – Eye tracking as a method to study reading and subtitling – Eye Tracking in Poland, Spain, Italy, Germany – Viewing Speed.

Pablo Romero-Fresco is a Reader in Translation and Filmmaking at the University of Roehampton (London) and Ramón y Cajal grantholder at the Universidade de Vigo (Spain). He is the author of Subtitling through Speech Recognition: Respeaking (2011), Ofcom’s external reviewer for the assessment of the quality of live subtitles in the UK, and a member of the UN’s ITU Focus Group on Media Accessibility and of the TransMedia Catalonia research group, for which he has coordinated the subtitling research of the EU-funded DTV4ALL project.

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