Automation in the Intralingual Subtitling Process: Exploring Productivity and User Experience

The demand for intralingual subtitles for television and video content is increasing. In Finland, major broadcasting companies are required to provide intralingual subtitles for all or a portion of their programming in Finnish and Swedish, excluding certain live events. To meet this need, technology could offer solutions in the form of automatic speech recognition and subtitle generation. Although fully automatic subtitles may not be of sufficient quality to be accepted by the target audience, they can be a useful tool for the subtitler. This article presents research conducted as part of the MeMAD project, where automatically generated subtitles for Finnish were tested in professional workflows with four subtitlers. We discuss observations regarding the effect of automation on productivity based on experiments where participants subtitled short video clips from scratch, by respeaking and by post-editing automatically generated subtitles, as well as the subtitlers’ experience based on feedback collected with questionnaires and interviews.