The supposedly subservient role of subtitles has, however, generally been reinforced by previous studies. Although it has also been suggested that whenever subtitles are present they are also noticed. According to some previous studies by d’Ydewalle et al. (1987,1991, as cited in Lång et al. 2013: 73), subtitles are read, at least to some extent, automatically even when they are not necessary for understanding. This arguably happens because the visual subtitles represent a more efficient channel for information than spoken dialogue. Although Tuominen (2012: 316) also reported findings of the apparent inevitability of subtitles, according to her findings they do not, despite being noticed, control the viewing experience:
[T]he informants’ commitment to reading subtitles was not very strong, and their expressed reception strategies occasionally minimised the role of subtitles. The story that these focus group discussions tell is of viewers who use subtitles whether they intend to or not, and who also listen to the source text, whether they want to or not.
Subtitles are a tool, a supportive text that helps in absorbing the audiovisual message.
They are not something to be read attentively and remembered afterwards, but something to be read quickly, superficially and accidentally in the multimodal flow of the film.
Also Lång et al. (2013: 77) noticed that the test subjects’ gaze was often directed at the bottom of the screen where subtitles usually appear whenever a character started to speak even when the subtitles were not present. Despite this, according to Lång et al. (2013: 83), the subtitles were not automatically sought by the participants at the beginning of a scene when there was something visually remarkable present until the subtitles actually appeared on screen. Therefore, the authors argued, quite logically, that the context of the subtitles combined with dialogue, sound effects, music and various visual elements all affect the viewing experience.
As the reading of subtitles and indeed the entire multimodal viewing experience are subject to individual variation, some studies have deployed eye-tracking which offers an interesting addition to the perception of subtitles as part of the multimodal context as it has the possibility of revealing unconscious reception processes. As translation errors have not been a frequent subject of study, eye-tracking studies have not extensively investigated them, either.
However, some noteworthy observations have been made. Lång et al. (2013: 72 86) studied specifically the effect of badly synchronized television subtitles on the attention allocation of viewers. The study consisted of two groups composed of students and staff of the University of Eastern Finland. A control group observed the material with normal subtitles and a test group was subjected to manipulated subtitles. The study material consisted of scenes from a British television sitcom Absolutely Fabulous subtitled in Finnish. On 32 occasions, the subtitles were purposely either lengthened unnecessarily or shortened to appear simultaneously with spoken dialogue. Specific eye-tracking equipment was installed to record the test subjects’ eye-movements during viewing.
Interestingly, in spite of the rather considerable number of manipulations, most of the desynchronized instances were not noticed at a conscious level. What is more, the subjects did react to erroneous instances unconsciously: lengthened subtitles repeatedly drew attention and
shortened subtitles that had been synchronized closely with the original dialogue were not read entirely due to lack of time to do so. Even when most of the manipulation affected the gaze paths of the viewers they were not consciously recognized and remained at the level of automatic sensory reactions.
This lack of conscious observations further resulted in another interesting finding: the translation, despite containing numerous errors, was not criticized in any particular manner, even though certain individual erroneous instances were reported. This would suggest that the overall AV experience is fluently perceivable even when individual erroneous instances have been noticed in it. Furthermore, both groups used in the study reported a roughly similar number of noticeable instances with something “odd” present in the subtitles. The difficulty of giving examples was also manifested: although half of the informants in the control group reported having seen something questionable, none of them could name any instances. In the test group, most had noticed something unusual, but only a clear minority (4 out of 11) could name an instance with one particular instance named by all of them.
Such a tendency to overlook problems and the difficulty of naming any particular instances can, of course, be at least to some extent the result of the test situation as members of a control group are not observing the subtitles in a natural environment and the very presence of specific eye-tracking equipment may well have affected the alertness and any notions made by the informants. The study makes a note of this (Lång et al. 2013: 75). However, the supposed tendency to overlook problematic instances in subtitles is further reinforced by a study conducted by Tuominen (2012). As her study explored a relatively arid terrain in translation studies, her findings and conclusions merit close observation as far as the entire AV reception process and individual differences and similarities are concerned. Her study revealed several interesting findings concerning the overall reception process and differences and similarities between informants both more and less familiar with translation. What is particularly intriguing is that these differences do not appear to be particularly noticeable, which is in line with previous studies on AV reception. In the following section, I will present further evidence to support the claim that AV translations, in general and along with their quality, may well pass almost unnoticed or without being noticed too meticulously.