5Watching Translated Audiovisuals: Does Age Really Matter?

Elisa Perego¹

The Dubbing vs. Subtitling Debate

The debate on the cognitive and evaluative consequences of dubbing vs. subtitling has always been vigorous yet largely conjectural (Danan, 1991; Díaz Cintas, 1999). Recently, a behavioural study has been carried out (Perego et al., 2015) to answer three core questions which have often been raised in the audiovisual and cognitive literature without finding a convincing and empirically grounded response. Such questions relate to (1) whether subtitling hinders comprehension and memory of a film; (2) whether dubbing is associated with a more fluent viewing experience, thus leading to greater final satisfaction and enjoyment; and (3) whether subtitling specifically hinders the comprehension and memory of a film in older adults. Currently, opposite views on the cognitive load and on the processing effectiveness of subtitling co-exist. Some scholars speculatively claim that processing subtitled products can be more effortful, more cognitively demanding, less effective and less enjoyable than processing dubbed materials (Díaz Cintas, 1999; Kilborn, 1993; Koolstra et al., 2002). Other scholars empirically show the effectiveness and semiautomaticity of subtitle processing at different levels (d’Ydewalle & De Bruycker, 2007; Perego et al., 2010), thus pointing out that speculative claims may have overstated the negative consequences of subtitling. Although existing research seems to support the latter view in adult viewers, the available evidence seems to be limited and not conclusive.

The same ambiguity pertains to dubbing. Some scholars believe that dubbing can provide greater enjoyment than subtitling because it is more appealing, satisfying and involving, and also less demanding from a cognitive point of view; in fact, it is thought to ease the effort of following the discourse development and not to require literacy skills (Danan, 1991; Díaz Cintas, 1999). However, the most comprehensive experimental study comparing the hedonic experiences associated with dubbing and subtitling in adult viewers (mean age=22.70) failed to find significant differences, and concluded that the translation method has no main effect on enjoyment (Wissmath et al., 2009).

Older Adults and Audiovisual Translation

When it comes to the consequences of audiovisual translation (AVT) processing in age-specific groups such as children and older adults, the literature is limited. A few studies on children have been carried out (d’Ydewalle & De Bruycker, 2007; Koolstra et al., 2002) but hardly any exist on older adults (Tonla Briquet, 1979; d’Ydewalle et al., 1989). Since older adults are a large and increasing sector of the population, and since they spend most of their waking hours watching TV (Depp et al., 2010; Motta et al., 2005), gaining a better understanding of their audiovisual processing effectiveness and enjoyment seems a relevant research objective.

In fact, despite (or perhaps due to) their greater exposure, older adults seem to enjoy the experience of watching TV less than younger adults do; they do not receive the benefits of stress reduction as younger adults do; and they enjoy TV watching less than other leisure activities. The reasons for these differences are still uncertain (Depp et al., 2010). In addition, there is some empirical evidence that younger adults may outperform older adults in audiovisual text-related activities (Depp et al., 2010; Frieske & Park 1999; Stine et al., 1990). For instance, in their study on the effects of ageing, Frieske and Park (1999) found that young adults recalled a higher proportion of news content than older adults, and they performed better on source recognition tests. They also showed that cognitive and sensory age-related decline might affect the overall ability to understand and remember information presented by the media, although the TV format seems less demanding than other formats. Indeed, a behavioural study with an ERP recording – event-related brain potential, i.e. a measured brain response to a specific sensory, cognitive or motor stimulus – on the perception of audiovisual vs. auditory speech shows that ‘unlike other areas of human condition, the ability to integrate AV events […] remains intact in old age’ (Winneke & Phillips, 2009: para. 4). According to the authors, the combined processing of redundant stimuli is more efficient and less effortful than processing non-redundant information (e.g. speech accompanied by a visual cue rather than speech only). Although younger adults seem to be more effective than older adults in audiovisual text-related activities, older adults seem to maintain a good capacity to process and integrate redundant audiovisual information. According to this view, we might not expect to observe peculiar differences between older and younger adults’ understanding and memory of subtitled (vs. dubbed) audiovisuals (i.e. subtitle processing would not be especially taxing for older adults), besides the general negative effect of cognitive and sensory decline.

In general, older adults are expected to show a performance decline in some aspects of cognitive functioning, such as fluid abilities, processing speed and episodic memory processes (Salthouse, 2004), as well as in comprehension (Dixon et al., 2012; Light, 2000). Thus, older adults are expected to show worse comprehension and memory of films than younger adults, regardless of the presentation method (dubbed or subtitled).

In non-English-speaking countries, a significant amount of films and material broadcast on TV is translated and delivered either dubbed or subtitled. Understanding whether dubbing and subtitling produce different cognitive and evaluative consequences in younger and older adults is therefore theoretically interesting and lends itself to a number of hypotheses. If we assume that subtitle processing is effective and it implies no major additional cognitive demands, then older adults should not be more impaired in the subtitling condition than in the dubbing condition, despite their cognitive decline. On the contrary, if we assume that subtitle processing is cognitively taxing, we should observe a stronger age-related performance decline in memory and comprehension in the subtitling condition, because the greater demands of the task should be fulfilled less effectively by the reduced cognitive resources of older adults, especially if subtitling is not familiar to them. This prediction would also be consistent with survey research showing that older adults, even in a subtitling country, report having problems with reading subtitles (Tonla Briquet, 1979), and with a study empirically demonstrating that, in fact, they spend less time reading subtitles and more time watching the visuals than young adults do (d’Ydewalle et al., 1989).

Dubbing and Subtitling in Younger and Older Adults: The Study and Its Results

Before investigating specifically the response of older adults to dubbing and subtitling, a study with a sample of undergraduates (mean age=23.55) was conducted to test two hypotheses: if subtitling is more cognitively taxing than dubbing, then viewers exposed to dubbing should outperform viewers exposed to subtitling on all cognitive measures and they should enjoy the film experience more. On the other hand, if subtitling is as cognitively taxing as dubbing, the alternative translation method should not yield significant differences in performance and in evaluation. In the experiment, the two translation methods were contrasted in a two-group between-subjects experimental design. Randomly assigned participants were exposed either to the dubbed version of a film clip or to the subtitled version of the same 26-minute excerpt of a Lebanese comedy (Caramel, Nadine Labaki, 2007) and they were subsequently administered a wide array of cognitive and evaluative measures. The cognitive measures included general comprehension, dialogue recognition, visual scene recognition (Figure 5.1) and name–face association (Figure 5.2); the evaluative measures included self-reported evaluations of processing effort, film appreciation and judgements of memory (Perego et al., 2010, 2015; Wissmath et al., 2009).

Viewers exposed to subtitling outperformed viewers exposed to dubbing in most cognitive measures and in all evaluative measures, demonstrating that subtitles are not an obstacle to the comprehension and memory of a film (in fact, they are more effective than dubbing when it comes to the lexical aspects of performance) and that watching a subtitled film does not decrease satisfaction or enjoyment of the viewing experience as participants in both groups equally appreciated the film. The findings show that dubbing does not provide any cognitive advantage over subtitling, at least in younger viewers, and that it is not appreciated more nor is it associated with a more fluent viewing experience. However, what happens if the same scenario is offered to older viewers? Will subtitling specifically hinder their comprehension and memory of the film? Will this consequently decrease the sense of satisfaction associated with the viewing experience?

Figure 5.1 Example of freeze-frames used in the scene recognition test. The panel on the left shows a frame that was presented in the video (target), while the panel on the right shows a frame that was not presented in the video (foil)

Figure 5.2 Example of face–name association item

Aware of the well-known cognitive decline of older adults (see previous section) and building on the opposite stances about the consequences of subtitling vs. dubbing discussed in the section ‘The Dubbing vs. Subtitling Debate’, two alternative hypotheses were formulated: if subtitling is really more taxing than dubbing, the performance and the evaluation of older adults will be specifically low in the subtitling condition, over and beyond the general effects of the age-related cognitive decline (as seen in both conditions). However, if subtitling is not specifically taxing, the performance and the evaluation of older adults will be similarly lower in both viewing conditions due to the similar effects of the age-related cognitive decline.

In a second experiment, the two AVT methods were contrasted in a new sample of younger (mean age=19.93) and older (mean age=66.88) Italian adults. A 2×2 between-subjects quasi-experimental design was followed and similar procedures and stimuli as in the first experiment were used. Besides making respondents watch the same video excerpt either in its dubbed or in its subtitled version and complete the same questionnaire, older adults were administered a battery of cognitive tests to discard those with serious cognitive deficit and appraise the influence of individual and age-related differences in fluid and crystallised intelligence, processing speed and vocabulary.

The results fully replicated and extended to older adults the findings of the first experiment. They show that, although the overall performance of older adults declines with both translation methods, age effects are not especially evident in a particular condition (dubbing or subtitling). In other words, older adults’ performance is consistently lower in both conditions, due to the negative influence of the age-related cognitive decline, but the differences between the subtitling and dubbing conditions are similar to those found in younger adults. In fact, despite the perceived cognitive effort that was similar in the two conditions, no difference between translation methods was observed within each age group in general comprehension or visual scene recognition, and an advantage of subtitling over dubbing was observed, again, in all the lexically related tasks (i.e. dialogue recognition and face–name association). It can thus be concluded that subtitling does not specifically hinder the viewing experience of older adults, who surprisingly appreciated the subtitled version slightly more than the dubbed one.

Some Applied Implications

The literature on the dubbing vs. subtitling debate was lacking empirical evidence on the cognitive and evaluative consequences of viewing dubbed or subtitled products and on age-related differences in accessing translated audiovisual material. The study reported in this chapter contributes to fill this gap. Its results support the view that processing subtitled material is cognitively effective (d’Ydewalle & De Bruycker, 2007; Perego et al., 2010) and that subtitles do not negatively affect the overall evaluation of a film (Wissmath et al., 2009) at all ages. They also show that, although viewers’ reported preferences favour the more familiar translation method (Kilborn, 1993; Luyken et al., 1991), preferences can change after exposure. Finally, and surprisingly, the study shows that even in a dubbing country, subtitling is not a big advantage or a big disadvantage for older adults with no significant sensory deficit, nor in a general younger audience. Last but not least, besides not being taxing, subtitling proved to have a positive effect on the lexical aspects of performance, which probably benefits from the written presentation of dialogues and from the extra attention paid by viewers to the unfamiliar task of subtitle reading.

Overall, such findings are thought-provoking and suggest interesting applications. The positive characteristics of subtitles (they are cognitively effective, do not hinder enjoyment, are understood and remembered well, do not interfere with film scenes and foster lexical recall) could be exploited more extensively – without rejecting dubbing and its advantages – to cater also for other segments of the population, such as older adults, hearing-impaired people, poorly educated and culturally disadvantaged people, immigrants and viewers with weak reading skills (d’Ydewalle & Van de Poel, 1999; Koolstra et al., 2002; Kothari & Takeda, 2000; Matamala & Orero, 2012). These are some of the potential beneficiaries of subtitles who have not yet fully exploited the advantages of such a translation method.

Older adults, a rapidly growing segment of the population in Europe and elsewhere, are known to spend proportionally more time than younger adults watching TV without benefitting from its stress-buffering effect and without enjoying such activity (Depp et al., 2010). This might be particularly true for those suffering from presbycusis, i.e. gradual age-related hearing loss. Hearing loss is the most common sensory deficit in the elderly and it is becoming a severe social and health problem, significantly impacting on everyday life and reducing the elderly’s quality of life (Ciorba et al., 2012). Besides impairing the exchange of information with other people, presbycusis can prevent full processing of (dubbed) audiovisual material, thus generating frustration, anxiety, dependence and social exclusion. Intralingual captions and interlingual subtitles (vs. dubbing or volume-rising, an activity that might worsen the condition), coupled with hearing aids and lip reading, could be of great assistance when watching television or going to the cinema or the theatre. The fact that older adults appreciate them and receive clear recall and understanding advantages from them should be an incentive to set out clear policies on the provision of captioned and subtitled programmes for a sector of the population who is becoming part of the mainstream. This could enable older adults to access audiovisual material independently, to appreciate and better retain its content, to enjoy the viewing experience and share it with others and, ultimately, to diminish the time spent passively in front of the television and spend more time in other healthier leisure activities, as suggested in the medical literature (Depp et al., 2010). By providing support to counteract such sensory loss and to partly offset its psychological and social implications, captions and subtitles should be exploited more in dubbing countries as a breakthrough yet simple solution for the well-being of ageing population. This is indeed one of the crucial challenges for the future of Europe, as has been acknowledged by the biggest EU research and innovation programme Horizon 2020.

The deaf community already benefits from specifically designed aids such as Teletext and SDH tracks on DVDs (Matamala & Orero, 2012), though these services could be further expanded to have a greater presence in cinemas as well as to cover the captioning of educational programmes and services and of promotional media products, such as commercials, which are still virtually inaccessible to a large sector of the population. New technologies could also be implemented and exploited in public environments to cater for the needs of hearing-impaired audiences without interfering with the needs of regular audiences. In Italy, for instance, MovieReading (www.moviereading.com) is an application designed to allow any smartphone, tablet or special 3D glasses to display synchronised captions for the deaf and offers audio descriptions for the blind in any cinema.

Ultimately, the benefits of subtitles for the general public should not be underestimated. First, the overall findings of the study support, on an empirically grounded basis, the assumptions put forward by authors such as Danan (1991) and Díaz Cintas (1999) on the advantages of constant exposition to subtitled material for second language learning and acquisition, and they also confirm earlier empirical findings on the specific beneficial role of subtitles in lexical acquisition and syntactic accuracy (Ghia, 2011; Koolstra & Beentjes, 1999; Van Lommel et al., 2006). Input is acknowledged to have a crucial role in both first and second language acquisition (SLA), a belief that is shared by different approaches. Functionalist approaches to SLA, for instance, maintain that linguistic information and the general grammar of a language are contained within input (Ellis, 2006) and they ascribe huge importance to the experience of input, which is considered necessary for the development of linguistic knowledge. On the other hand, mentalist approaches to SLA maintain that linguistic knowledge is mainly innate and mind-internal (White, 2003) and they support the view whereby input supplements learning by acting as a device to activate the internal grammar and set of language-specific rules, whose functioning mechanisms are internally predetermined (Ghia, 2011). Whatever role is ascribed to input, exposure to it in all its manifestations is crucial for learners and the development of their language competence. Audiovisual material enhanced with captions and subtitles is a good purveyor of motivating linguistic and extra-linguistic input; it has a recognised positive impact on reading proficiency (Koolstra et al., 1997); it is easily recoverable (DVDs, digital television, videogames) especially on the internet (e.g. fansubs); it facilitates continuous exposure to written language; and it is associated to leisurely activities – television or cinema watching, video gaming – which makes viewers more receptive to language input and more successful learners (Krashen, 1987). Finally, captions and subtitles are read quasi automatically, which fosters incidental language acquisition, a learning mechanism that has proven effective both in children and adults (Saffran et al., 1997). Such benefits and potentials are undervalued in dubbing countries (Danan, 2004), where a more systematic use of captions and subtitles should be considered both in formal learning environments at the earliest stages of education and out of the classroom, in cinemas and on television. This would work as a nearly costless but potentially profitable investment on the population’s language proficiency acquisition and development. The benefits would include the ability to overcome language communication barriers with the subsequent consequence of facilitating trade between cultures and social interaction, thus potentially leading to better paying jobs and economic success also in foreign countries. The payoffs for immigrants would include incentives to learn the host language, integration, stronger social networks and more varied occupational opportunities, offsetting discrimination based on language ability along with residential and occupational segregation.

Second, dubbing is more expensive than subtitling and this determines the nature and the number of products that a dubbing country imports and distributes (Kilborn, 1993). Because of the positive reception and proved effectiveness of both AVT methods, which seem irrespective of age and familiarity with them (Perego et al., 2015), in dubbing countries subtitling could function as a complementary AVT form. Such investment would facilitate the import of more audiovisual products, the allocation of more space to niche (vs. Anglo-Saxon-centric) products on the market, the promotion of a real multilingual broadcasting policy, the provision of services to minorities and special interest audiences.

Given the potential of captioning and subtitling, a further number of specific aspects of both methods should be reconsidered and investigated empirically on various samples of end users to establish the optimum conditions for the enjoyment of audiovisual material (translated and not translated) by specific groups of population. This would contribute to the development and empirical validation of a much needed cognitive theory on the evaluation and processing of audiovisual material accompanied by text (e.g. subtitled films, annotated news broadcasts, advertisements, programmes including notes at the top/bottom of the screen, fansubs) and on the information processing strategies that are associated with ageing, both in the cases of hearing and hearing-impaired audiences.

Research Merits, Limitations and Future Development

Despite the merits and promising results of the study, there are a number of limitations that should be overcome in the future to better understand the mechanisms that regulate the reception of translated audiovisuals and explain the way that multimedia communication works.

From a methodological perspective, the study shows potential for analysing film watching by considering simultaneously (1) a wide array of different measures (i.e. cognitive and evaluative); (2) different age groups (with a special focus on the elderly, who have never been the subject of AVT research); and (3) end users’ individual differences, which in turn allows for a richer characterisation of performance. The merit of this interdisciplinary approach lies in the fact that it can be easily applied and generalised to other hedonic activities. Although it represents a step forward in AVT research, thanks to its newness in the field, a more comprehensive picture of the viewing experience and of its consequences would benefit from the collection of further concurrent measures of cognitive and emotional processing. In this respect, eye tracking (d’Ydewalle & De Bruycker, 2007; Kruger & Steyn, 2013; Perego et al., 2010), along with heart rate, skin conductance (Fryer, 2013) and thermography, which has proven useful to study the reception of audience emotions (Flys, 2013), have already contributed significantly. However, other non-invasive technologies allowing for the continuous monitoring of the cognitive and emotional processes and responses, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET) or various physiological measures (Schulte-Mecklenbeck et al., 2010), could complement more traditional measures and broaden the picture of AVT processing effects.

A further limitation pertains to the population sample. Although the study has empirically studied a population (older viewers) who has not been specifically considered in previous literature, the sample still remains peculiar. In the first place, the age range of the viewers recruited for the study (60–78 years) comprises ‘younger old’ (ages 65–75) and treats them as a homogeneous group. However, it fails to include and distinguish ‘older old’ (ages 75–85) and ‘oldest old’ (ages 85+) according to the terminology used by the WHO (1999). Furthermore, participants belong to a dubbing country, are unfamiliar with subtitling, and older viewers were all fit and healthy, had a regular social life and did not differ in years of education (t(150)=1.22, p=0.22) from younger viewers. Therefore, the findings might need to be generalised to different populations. However, it is plausible that the extension of the study to participants who are more familiar with subtitling (e.g. Scandinavians) would confirm our findings or show stronger benefits of subtitling over dubbing. Participant gender could also be introduced as a factor in future research.

As for the stimuli, the study uses a single and relatively simple short film excerpt. This is in line with most AVT research and it does not seem to impact on the quality of the findings, which are consistent with existing empirical literature. Future research, however, could benefit from manipulating film genre, length, redundancy and complexity. The processing strategies and the relative attention paid to the audiovisual text might depend on the type and the complexity of the material in question, on its redundancy, on its relative importance or on the viewer’s cognitive characteristics (Grimes, 1991). In fact, only in a challenging and potentially interfering viewing situation (low redundancy, complex material, fast rate) may the viewer be closer to cognitive overload, and the restrictions of the cognitive effectiveness of subtitle processing may emerge. In addition, exposing viewers to lengthy audiovisual products (full film vs. excerpt) may contribute to test a more natural-like viewing situation. Future studies should also resort to more than one message (film) to prevent the confounding influence of extraneous message attributes, and they should rely on a comprehensive and measurable definition of film complexity, i.e. one which not only encompasses film structural aspects (e.g. edits and cuts), but also language and narrative complexity (e.g. grammatical intricacy, lexical density, speech rate, along with serialised vs. episodic plots, rich story-world vs. one-way flow).

Finally, performance assessment and personal evaluation were carried out right after the film experience, allowing for no delay between actual experience and measurements. However, replicating the study and collecting performance and evaluation measures after a longer delay would enable the researcher to check their robustness and to gain additional information for predicting viewers’ intentions (e.g. seeing a similar movie in the future). Studies exist showing that the retrospective evaluation of a hedonic experience after a time delay can differ from the immediate evaluation and has even more influence on future decisions (Wirtz et al., 2003), which could have an impact on the viewer’s future choice of watching a dubbed or a subtitled film.

Conclusions

The results of this study provide evidence supporting the view that age actually matters when watching translated audiovisual material in that it causes a general – yet consistent – deterioration in the performance of older viewers, who do worse than younger viewers in both conditions. However, age does not seem to cause any specific effect on subtitle processing. Indeed, both methods (dubbing and subtitling) seem equally effective and appreciated by younger and older adults alike. This suggests that both methods should be exploited more, and adapted to different types of viewers, because of their important advantages in specific situations: captions and subtitles for older viewers with hearing loss or for people needing to train their literacy skills, and dubbed material with or without audio description for visually impaired viewers. To do so, the discrepancy between people’s understanding and recalling expectations, if exposed to either method, and their real performance, with the expected performance claimed to be worse than the real one (Perego et al., 2010), together with lay people’s convictions about the consequences of watching dubbed or subtitled programmes should be overcome through the dissemination and popularisation of the results of empirical studies showing the mechanisms of AVT reception. Although more analyses are clearly needed to reach definitive answers, this piece of research allows us to conclude that negative claims about the cognitive and evaluative consequences of subtitling – especially in older viewers – have been clearly overstated in the past.

Note

(1)This research has been supported by the University of Trieste Research Fund FRA 2013: Towards an empirical evaluation of audiovisual translation: A new integrated approach.

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