A user-centred study of the norms for subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing on french television
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH) have been present on French television since the late seventies. However, it was not until nearly thirty years after they first appeared that the practice was made mandatory on the main channels. In February 2005, the French government passed a law on equal rights and opportunities for disabled people which required all state-owned and private channels with a minimum annual audience share of 2.5% to use adapted subtitles in order to make 100% of their programming accessible to the deaf and hard-of-hearing by 12 February 2010. Following increasing complaints that regulations of this kind promoted a rapid increase in the quantity of SDH to the detriment of quality, the government produced a reference document about minimum SDH requirements. This document was signed by major SDH stakeholders and put into practice on 12 December 2011. Although this discipline is now recognised by the government, research into subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing in France is still very scarce. This doctoral research is the first on this subject in France and the first to involve French viewers of SDH at a national level. Written in the form of three articles, this empirical study places itself within what translation theorist Holmes (2000, 176) defined as a product-oriented descriptive approach, with a restricted scope within the audiovisual text-type on the medium of television. The study of norms in a given place at a given time being the essence of this research project, this work centres on the rationale behind the theory of norms developed by Toury (1995), and extended by Chesterman (1997) and Hermans (1999), in the realm of subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Due to its complexity and its functional nature, SDH, and by extension this study, draws on different disciplines and areas of research?including Film Studies, Musicology, Deaf Studies, Linguistics, Psychology, and, within the realm of Translation Studies, interlingual subtitling, SDH theory, and live subtitling. Adopting a quantitative research strategy with a questionnaire as research method, this doctoral thesis examines whether deaf and HoH viewers of subtitles are satisfied with the norms of these subtitles as they are used on French television at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty first century. This work first maps the practice of subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing in France, retraces its history and its main actors, and determines who defines and implements its norms and rules. Then it sets out to study whether the required output of SDH was met prior to and following the implementation of the 2005 law in February 2010 by analysing live and pre-recorded programmes with SDH between 2009 and 2010 on the five national channels with the highest annual audience share. Next, this study progresses to its core element, the questionnaire to SDH viewers conducted at a national level on the Internet, which evaluates French SDH norms, including the colour code. Finally, France?s national quality standard for SDH (Charte), which establishes minimum subtitling rules across television channels and programmes, is analysed considering the validity of the requirements it sets out for all of the stakeholders involved. The results suggest that there is ample room for improvement in the French norms and, by extension, in the Charte.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".