Used in other countries for some time, respeaking has recently been introduced to Switzerland. One of its challenges is mentioned by Lambourne (2006: n.p.): “composing adequate subtitle text for unscripted material as it is spoken (this touches on grammar, editing, time delay, factual accuracy, typographical accuracy, completeness);“
This raises the question of how much and what information contained in a live broadcast can be transferred, and whether that information is changed in the process of respeaking. This paper presents transcripts of live broadcasts on Swiss Television and uses contrastive analysis to compare them with the respoken subtitles. Such analysis enables us to identify discrepancies between the two texts, a striking example being the rendition of the German word "Konsum" (“consumption”) by "Kondom" (“condom”) in the Swiss news programme 10vor10. While such lexical problems are often attributable to features of the text-to-speech systems being used, the subtle changes in information introduced by the respeakers themselves present more interesting material. By comparing the original text with the respoken subtitles, we can document mechanisms whereby information is changed in the process of respeaking and can design measures to improve quality. The project is conducted in collaboration with Swiss TxT AG, the subsidiary responsible for respeaking at Swiss Television.

References
Lambourne, Andrew, 2006, “Subtitle respeaking, A new skill for a new age”, inTRAlinea – online Translation Journal of SITLeC, Special Issues on Respeaking. Online under: http://www.intralinea.it/specials/respeaking/eng_more.php?id=447_0_41_0_M, last visited: 27.05.2008.

Susanne J. JEKAT obtained both her MA in Romance languages (1985) and her PhD in multilingualism (1992) on "Bilingual language acquisition" from the University of Hamburg. From 1993 -1998 she worked as a researcher at the Computer Science Department at the University of Hamburg within the VERBMOBIL project, from 1998 -1999 she was a researcher at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, IMMD-8 Artificial Intelligence and from 1999 - 2002 member of the Research Centre for Multilingualism at the University of Hamburg again. From 2002 to the present she has been a Professor in Computational Linguistics and the Head of Research & Development at the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, Zurich University of Applied Sciences.