Intralingual subtitling (also known as captioning) contains a written version of dialogues in the same language (e.g., English to English), whereas interlingual subtitling is a translation of a foreign dialogue (e.g., English to Dutch). Two main types of subtitling can be distinguished: intra- and interlingual. The pervasiveness of subtitling, coupled with a significant shift from slow to increasingly high subtitle speeds, offer a timely opportunity to examine the effects of speed on viewers’ processing of subtitled videos. Yet, despite the ubiquity of subtitling, little is known about optimum subtitle speeds and their impact on cognitive processing. Together with an ever-growing demand for subtitles in digital media, we are witnessing an increase in subtitle speeds. The results provide empirical grounds for revisiting current subtitling practices to enable more efficient processing of subtitled videos for viewers. Faster subtitles with unreduced text were preferred in the case of English videos, and slower subtitles with text edited down in Hungarian videos. Slow subtitles triggered more re-reading, particularly in English clips, causing more frustration and less enjoyment. By analyzing people’s eye gaze, we were able to discover that most viewers could read the subtitles as well as follow the images, coping well even with fast subtitle speeds. We measured viewers’ comprehension, self-reported cognitive load, scene and subtitle recognition, preferences and enjoyment. The films were either in Hungarian, a language unknown to the participants (Experiment 1), or in English (Experiment 2). We tested 74 English, Polish and Spanish viewers watching films subtitled at different speeds (12, 16 and 20 characters per second). This study looks into whether viewers can keep up with increasingly fast subtitles and whether the way people cope with subtitled content depends on their familiarity with subtitling and on their knowledge of the language of the film soundtrack. However, there is an ongoing controversy about what optimum subtitle speeds should be. With the proliferation of subtitled content, we are also witnessing an increase in subtitle speeds. People watch subtitled audiovisual materials more than ever before.
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