Clash of the Captions: How do Inaccurate Subtitles Impact Viewers' Attention Distribution?

While traditionally subtitles have been employed for the purposes of translation or accessibility, increases in online content consumption and digital education have made it more salient just how many people employ same-language subtitles. One of the main issues with subtitling is the cost associated with high quality subtitles, which leads many companies to opt for cheaper and less accurate machine-generated subtitles. The purpose of this research is to investigate how lexical errors in auto-generated subtitles impact how viewers’ distribute their attention. Using data collected from a series of eye-tracking experiments, here we will investigate if inaccurate subtitles cause any significant impact on where people distribute their attention when viewing subtitled content. [Research is ongoing and this will be updated at a later time.]