1 Experimental Research: testing viewers’ perception of culture through subtitles Kristijan Nikolić kristijan.nikolic@gmail.com Department of English, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb University, Ivana Lučića 3, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia. Tel: +385 91 2520 495 AVT scholars and Translation Studies scholars in general, often refer to ‘readers’ or ‘viewers’. This paper tries to shed more light on how viewers perceive subtitles. It primarily deals with the results of experimental research. The aim of this research was to try and find a model of testing viewer perception of culture that could later be used in testing various aspects of viewer perception of audio-visual content. It was also important to establish possible differences between subtitler’s expectations of what viewers will be familiar with, which elements of culture and words of the English language, and what viewers are familiar with. This study also focused on the degree to which viewers perceive subtitles as relevant for their understanding of British and American culture in AV content, in comparison to other aspects of audio-visual content, such as context of the scene and non-verbal communication. One of the goals of this experimental research was also to establish to what degree viewers perceive language as a part of culture. Keywords: AVT, viewer perception, subtitles, culture, experiment, Croatia Introduction This research stems from the wish to shed more light on how viewers perceive subtitles and what aspects of audiovisual, AV, content play a role in its understanding by the viewers. The research is based on an experiment conducted on a sample of 98 subjects, undergraduate university students. The research was conducted within the scope of reception studies in AVT and it was motivated by the lack of such studies since “very few studies have dealt with the issue of screen translation, and even fewer have dealt with it empirically, even though we continually make references to readers, viewers, consumers, etc.” (Gambier 2003: 184). Since 2003, when Gambier wrote this, the situation as regards empirical studies has improved, the number of these studies has not improved significantly, since such studies are complex and lengthy. It turned out that the realization of such an experiment would incur substantial costs given the fact that travelling across the country and finding subjects willing to participate in this experiment would take time and substantial resources. The experiment would be limited to British and American culture since these two cultures, especially American, are those which television viewers in Croatia are mostly exposed to. There was also the awareness that making a questionnaire may sound easy, but that making it statistically valid and usable must involve more work than just compiling a set of questions. The initial concept was to play