Photo: Anu Viljanmaa
The amount of audiovisual material is increasing day by day, and our society is nowadays very much focused on the visuals. In her doctoral dissertation, Frederike Schierl investigated how machine-translated subtitles for educational videos are perceived by consumers, compared to traditionally made, i.e. human-made, subtitles. The study demonstrated that machine-translated subtitles are not more distracting than human-translated subtitles and they do not lead to a significantly higher loss of information. Therefore, they can serve well when it comes to sheer information transmission. However, the study suggests that human-made subtitles are preferred because machine-translated subtitles do not adhere to common subtitling standards and they come with quality issues.
The doctoral dissertation of MA Frederike Schierl in the field of Translation Studies titled Machine Translation Potential (Un)limited - Investigating the reception of machine-translated and human-translated subtitles in educational videos will be publicly examined at the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University on 13 March 2026.
The Opponent will be Professor Agnieszka Szarkowska from the University of Warsaw in Poland. The Custos will be Professor Mikhail Mikhailov from the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University.