Visual attention distribution in intralingual respeaking. An eye-tracking study

Respeaking is a method of producing real-time subtitles for live television programmes, enabling access to the media for people who are deaf, hard of hearing or who support their viewing with subtitles. Respeaking requires a set of skills akin to both interpreting and subtitling, including multitasking and management of concurrent sources of incoming information. In this chapter we present the results of an eye-tracking study on the visual attention of respeakers during an intralingual respeaking task (Polish to Polish). We tested 57 people while they were respeaking a 5-minute news programme. Participants also underwent a short proof-reading task. There were three groups of participants: interpreters, translators and a control group of people with no interpreting/translation experience. We examined the number of fixations and mean fixation duration on major screen areas: picture, subtitles, dictation area and subtitle panel. We found that translators who had experience in subtitling were able to manage their visual attention most efficiently as they fixated more often on key screen areas and their fixations were longer than in other groups. They also achieved the highest score on the proof-reading task, which suggest they could work in respeaking as editors.