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This paper presents results from a small pilot study carried out within the EU-funded Compass project. With eye tracking, subtitlers’ distribution of attention and monitoring during subtitling with the commercial subtitling software FAB Subtitler was investigated and analysed. During three intralingual subtitling tasks for excerpts of German documentaries we recorded data on gaze activity of eight subtitlers. An annotation of the created subtitles based on a comparison of the subtitles from the recording and the corrected subtitles after post-experiment proofread- ing allows us to link product with process data. We found that during subtitling, attention is shifted back and forth between monitoring the content of the evolving subtitles and the timing and segmentation thereof. Results show that subtitle reading times were longer on subtitles that were corrected during post-experiment proofreading. In addition, we found a significant interaction with subtitle ID in that incorrect subtitles had longer reading times than correct subtitles in the beginning of the process but for subtitles created later in the session this difference was no longer significant. This suggests that later in a subtitling session participants’ monitoring capacities are impacted possibly by fatigue or cognitive overload. In this paper, we will elaborate on the methodology and procedure and suggest interpretations and possible implications. &nbsp

The increasing demand for citizen engagement in areas traditionally belonging exclusively to experts, such as health, law and technology has given rise to the necessity of making expert knowledge available to the general public through genres such as instruction manuals for consumer goods, patient information on medication and tax information. Such texts are often written by experts and received by lay people, and, in today’s globalised world, they are often translated as well. In these functional texts, the receiver is not a mere recipient of information, but s/he needs to be able to act upon it. Action requires understanding, and these texts consequently need to be optimally comprehensible. The aim of this paper is therefore to provide a framework for optimising comprehensibility in translation. In order to do so, the concept of intralingual translation is argued for as a useful starting point. It is argued that Plain Language writing is a type of intralingual translation as it involves rewriting or translating a complex monolingual text into comprehensible language. Based on Plain Language literature, a comprehensibility framework is elaborated, which is subsequently exemplified through the functional text type of Patient Information Leaflet. Finally, the usefulness of applying the principles of Plain Language and intralingual translation for optimising comprehensibility in interlingual translation is discussed.