“A Spanish version of EastEnders”: a reception study of a telenovela subtitled using MT

Abstract

This article presents the results of three AVT reception experiments with over 200 English-speaking participants who watched a 20-minute clip of a Mexican telenovela in three different translation modalities: human-translated (HT), post-edited (PT) and machine-translated (MT). Participants answered a questionnaire on narrative engagement, enjoyment, and translation reception of the subtitles. The results show that viewers have a higher engagement with PE than HT, but there is only a statistically significant difference when PE is compared to MT. When it comes to enjoyment, the differences are more pronounced, and viewers enjoy MT significantly less than PE and HT. Finally, in translation reception, the gap is even more pronounced between MT vs. PE and HT. However, the high HTER scores demonstrate that a substantial amount of edits are necessary to render the automatic MT subtitles publishable. It is not clear that results would be comparable were subtitlers not given sufficient time or remuneration for the post-editing task.