Jan-Louis Kruger – Media for All 8 – Stockholm

PODCAST | Francesca Raffi interviews Jan-Louis Kruger, for FRED’s periodical programme on media accessibility.

Jan-Louis Kruger is Head of the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia where he also teaches in audiovisual translation. His main research interests include studies on the reception and processing of audiovisual translation products including aspects such as cognitive load, comprehension, attention allocation, and psychological immersion. His current research projects investigate cognitive load in the context of educational subtitling with a view to optimising subtitles as language support in second language environments, as well as the processing of subtitles as dynamic text using eye tracking. Before joining the editorial board of Journal of Audiovisual Translation (the first international journal dedicated to audiovisual translation studies published by European Association for Studies in Screen Translation), he was a co-editor of Perspectives – Studies in Translation Theory and Practice.

The 8th Media for All International Conference was held at Stockholm University on June 17–19, 2019. The conference attracted academics, researchers, language practitioners, translators, interpreters, broadcasters, government agencies, support groups and the audiovisual translation (AVT) and media accessibility (MA) industry, not only from Europe, but indeed from all over the world. As Jan-Louis Kruger says in the interview, research on the reception and processing of multimodal texts has developed rapidly. This has given us new insights into the way viewers, for example, process the text of subtitles while also attending to auditory input as well as the rich visual code of film. The presentation speed of subtitles is a highly controversial topic in AVT. Recent research tends to be concerned with the question of what presentation speed viewers can handle. Less work has been done on the impact of high presentation rates on viewer experience, or more specifically, on the ability of viewers to access the multimodal richness of a subtitled film. Therefore, in the interview, Jan-Louis Kruger will present the findings of a recent experiment designed explicitly to determine the impact of presentation speed not only on viewer comprehension and attention distribution, but also on the very act of reading.

To discover more about Media For All Conference, click here.