Jan-Louis Kruger is professor of Linguistics at Macquarie University. He started his research career in English literature with a particular interest in the way in which Modernist poets and novelists manipulate language, and in the construction of narrative point of view. From there he started exploring the creation of narrative in film and how audiovisual translation (subtitling and audio description) facilitates the immersion of audiences in the fictional reality of film.

In the past decade his attention has shifted to the multimodal integration of language in video where auditory and visual sources of information supplement and compete with text in the processing of subtitles. His research uses eye tracking experiments to investigate the cognitive processing of language in multimodal contexts. His current work looks at the impact of redundant and competing sources of information on the reading of subtitles at different presentation rates and in the presence of different languages. He also does work on media accessibility, with a specific interest in making videos and online content accessible, including aspects like readability. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Audiovisual Translation.