Japan has been one of the subtitling countries since the release of the first subtitled film in 1931. However, few studies investigated the now de facto standard of Japanese subtitling, i.e. the 4 CPS (character per second) rule. This paper examines the appropriateness of this rule based on eye-tracking experiment on ten graduate students. In the experiment, the participants watched three different versions of subtitled films, created under 4, 6, and 8 CPS conditions respectively. A questionnaire was administered afterward to ask the participants about their film viewing experience in this experiment. The results indicated that a majority of the participants preferred 6 CPS versions of subtitled films, indicating that the traditional 4 CPS rule may be a bit outdated for today's audience. The author also conducted interviews with two professional subtitle translators to seek opinions from practitioners involved in the industry. This paper is based on my masters’ thesis.

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