User Experience Of Subtitling Translation Tools:a Comparative Study

As the demand for the translation of subtitles in films and videos increases,professional subtitling teams and fansub groups have emerged and audiovisual translation starts to thrive.In the translation of subtitles,software tools are indispensable.They simplify the complex subtitling process and make it possible for almost everyone to create subtitles.However,these tools vary in user experience in terms of functionality,quality,and other aspects.By finding the pain points of users,software developers can optimize their products and services according to the market demands,and improve these subtitling software that better satisfy users,optimize the subtitling procedure,and deliver high-quality results.This study investigates the user experience of six mainstream subtitling translation tools in terms of five essential functions.The six tools are Renren,Arctime,Aegisub,Subtitle Edit,Jubler,and DD Subtitle,and the five essential functions are translation assistance,timeline alignment,text editing,subtitle style adjustment,and error checking.By exploring users’evaluations and demands,this study seeks to identify potential problems in their user experience and provide suggestions for software developers to improve these tools’usability.The user experience of the selected mainstream subtitling tools was gathered through interviews,a subtitling task,and questionnaires.Nine subtitlers from different subtitling teams were interviewed to find out what the popular subtitling tools were and their basic functions.Then a subtitling task was designed based on the basic functions and was completed by 81 Master’s students from a university in Beijing who had learned how to use subtitling tools.In this task,each participant needed to create bilingual English-Chinese subtitles for a video clip using three specified subtitling tools-Renren,Arctime,and Aegisub-and one self-selected subtitling tool,respectively.Having finished the task,the participants completed three questionnaires for finding out their perception of the strengths and weaknesses of these tools,the usability of these tools,and their ranking of the five basic functions in terms of importance.Tencent questionnaire platform was used to for the surveys;NVivo,a qualitative research tool,was adopted to analyze the students’comments;and the online data analysis platform SPSSAU was employed to derive the ranking of the five basic functions.Through quantitative and qualitative analysis,this study finds that among the six mainstream subtitling software,Renren was regarded as the best in user experience by the participants,while Jubler received the least favorable ratings.In terms of the five basic functions,timeline alignment was the most important to users,followed by text editing and style adjustment,and then translation assistance and auto-checking.Renren was most highly praised for its text editing,translation assistance,and error checking functions.Arctime performed well in timeline alignment and subtitle style adjustment.The effort-saving automated functions were widely welcomed by users,such as auto-spotting,speech recognition,auto-translation,auto-checking,etc.However,the output quality of these functions was not satisfactory,and there was still much room for improvement.In addition,shortcut key settings,interface layout,and system stability also had an impact on user experience.Users’ evaluation and feedback are significant sources of information to facilitate the optimization and upgrading of the software.Based on the findings of this study,the deficiencies of the subtitling systems can be examined one by one at each functional dimension to improve their usability and user experience.The ranking of the five basic functions in terms of importance points to the priorities for system improvement,and improving the accuracy of automated functions deserves more attention.This study provides reference for subtitling software developers and new direction for research in audiovisual translation.