Strengthening respeakers’ training in Spain. The research-practice connection

After countless petitions and complaints from end users, live subtitling quality is slowly attracting the attention of broadcasters, regulators, the subtitling industry and scholars working in Media Accessibility. These stakeholders share an interest in providing better live subtitles, but their quality assessment is a thorny issue. Although quality studies are still scarce, the research undertaken so far has proven valuable in identifying the weaknesses of live subtitles in several countries. This article presents the main findings of the pilot project that preceded the first national quality assessment in Spain, which is currently underway. By focusing on this case study, we will argue that live subtitling quality research may fulfil an additional purpose: serving as a didactic tool in respeaking courses. In this paper we will outline the quality assessment method that we followed, discuss how its main results informed about the accuracy, speed and latency of our samples, and describe how these data may be brought to the classroom to fine tune respeakers’ training under a Performance Analysis approach.