How condensation and non-condensation impact viewers’ processing effort and comprehension – an eye-tracking study on Chinese subtitling of English documentaries

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ABSTRACT Interlingual subtitling is expected to be concise to facilitate viewers’ comprehension and avoid drawing their attention, so condensation is a strategy frequently applied. While research has shown that longer subtitles cause longer mean fixation duration, viewers’ processing effort is affected not only by subtitle length but also by linguistic complexity and information intensity. It remains to be investigated whether condensation is suitable for information-intensive genres like documentaries. This study explores viewers’ processing effort for and comprehension of condensed and non-condensed Chinese subtitles of an English documentary via an eye-tracking experiment. Forty-five participants took part in the experiment and did a comprehension test. Data analyses show that the fixation duration per Chinese character for the non-condensed version is significantly lower and the saccade length is significantly larger, implying that the processing effort for non-condensed subtitles is lower. Furthermore, there is no significant difference between the two groups’ comprehension test scores. The results suggest that non-condensed subtitles can be more suitable for information-intensive genres like documentaries.