Biography
Pablo Romero Fresco is Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Universidade de Vigo, Spain, and Honorary Professor of Translation and Filmmaking at the University of Roehampton, London. He is the author of the books Subtitling through Speech Recognition: Respeaking (Routledge), Accessible Filmmaking: Integrating Translation and Accessibility into the Filmmaking Process (Routledge, forthcoming) and the editor of The Reception of Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Europe (Peter Lang). He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Audiovisual Translation (JAT) and is currently working with several governments, universities, companies and user associations around the world to introduce and improve access to live events for people with hearing loss. He has collaborated with Ofcom to carry out the first analysis of the quality of live subtitles on TV in the UK and is working with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) on a similar project in Canada. He is the leader of the international research centre GALMA (Galician Observatory for Media Access), for which he is currently coordinating several international projects on media accessibility and accessible filmmaking, including “Media Accessibility Platform” and “ILSA: Interlingual Live Subtitling for Access”, funded by the EU Commission. Pablo is also a filmmaker. His documentary Joining the Dots (2012) was screened during the 69th Venice Film Festival and has been used by Netflix as well as film schools around Europe to raise awareness about audio description.
Email: p.romero-fresco@roehampton.ac.uk
promero@uvigo.es
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Note 1:
It is worth noting that eye tracking can only detect the central vision obtained by the fovea (Slaghuis and Thompson 2003). Foveal vision allows us to obtain detailed information typically within six degrees of our field vision, that is, spanning five words in a row when reading printed text at ordinary size at about 50 centimeters from the eyes. Parafoveal or peripheral vision, which can span up to 120 degrees, is thus not detected by eye trackers. However, even though peripheral vision can be used to differentiate movement from stillness and even certain types of rhythms and contrast, it cannot help to distinguish colours, shapes or details (Wästlund et al. 2017). For the purpose of this study, peripheral vision could potentially be used, given the right conditions, to differentiate whether a mouth is moving or not, but certainly not to discern the degree of (a)synchrony between moving lips and the dubbed audio. In other words, participants whose fixations are found on the characters’ eyes cannot be expected to be put off by the imperfect synchrony of lips and audio often found in dubbing.
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Note 2:
Although the study by Di Giovanni and Romero-Fresco (2019) was conducted after the experiment presented here, it has been published earlier. The Italian study did not focus on the dubbing effect, but it has found evidence to support it.
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