Examining the impact of different workflows on quality. Automatic speech recognition and post- editing in intralingual subtitling

In Finland, the law requires that the public broadcaster provides intralingual subtitles for all its programming in Finnish, except for live sports and music events. While automatic speech recognition is not yet sufficiently accurate to produce fully automatic subtitles in Finnish, it could prove to be a valuable tool for both broadcasters and subtitlers. The productivity of post-editing automatically produced subtitles has been studied, but little research exists on the impact the post-editing process has on subtitle quality. This paper examines the quality of post-edited intralingual subtitles produced in experiments conducted as part of the MeMAD project, comparing them to subtitles produced from scratch by the same participants, using an adapted version of the FAR model. Results suggest that the quality of post-edited subtitles suffers compared to subtitles prepared from scratch.