Machine-Translated Subtitles and Education: The Future of More Accessible Learning? Insights from an Eye- Tracking Study

Globalization has flattened the world. This does not apply only to the
global economy, but also increasingly to education. In line with this, educational material available online and in video format has become an integral part of today’s education. Despite the availability, support with the aid of audiovisual translation is sometimes needed to make the content more accessible, which especially applies to content in a language other than the student might be proficient in. In these cases, subtitling has become an important aid to support this need. However, as of today, the material to be translated exceeds the capacities of human subtitlers. Machine translation can contribute to a cost- and time-efficient alternative. Nevertheless, since research on the topic is still scarce, the question of how the consumer perceives such subtitles in an educational context, in which the correct transmission of information is crucial, remains. When it comes to machine translation, the benefit of information gain and learning effect is only one aspect, sufficient quality is another issue. This study presents the results of an eye-tracking study contrasting the reception of machine-translated and human-translated subtitles in German, Finnish, and English. The overall results show that the translation mode itself is not decisive, but rather, gaze behaviour depends on the general language competence of the viewer to understand the video’s original language, therefore the dependence on the subtitling to understand the content. These quantitative results give insight into the potential that machine translation has in the context of broad accessibility.