Comprehension of Subtitles from Re-Translating Simultaneous Speech Translation

Anonymous

Abstract: In simultaneous speech translation, one can vary the size of the output window,system latency and sometimes the allowed level of rewriting. The effect of theseproperties on readability and comprehensibility has not been tested with modernneural translation systems.In this work, we propose an evaluation method and investigate the effects on comprehension and user preferences. It is a pilot study with 14 users on 2 hours of German documentaries or speeches with onlinetranslations into Czech. We collect continuous feedback and answers on factualquestions. Our results show that the subtitling layout or flicker have a littleeffect on comprehension, in contrast to machine translation itself andindividual competence. Other results show that users with a limited knowledge ofthe source language have different preferences to stability and latency than theusers with zero knowledge. The results are statistically insignificant, however, we show that our method works and can be reproduced in larger volume.