Gazing and Typing Activities during Translation: A Comparative Study of Translation Units of Professional and Student Translators

Abstract

Le présent article examine la notion d’unités de traduction (UT) sous un angle cognitif. Une UT est définie comme l’unité sur laquelle l’attention du traducteur se focalise. L’attention pouvant être dirigée vers la compréhension du texte source (ST) ou la production du texte cible (TT), ou les deux, le mouvement des yeux et le rythme de frappe des traducteurs sont tous deux analysés. Nous décrivons des méthodes permettant de repérer les motifs de frappe (unités de production) et les schémas de fixation du regard sur le texte source (unités de fixation). De plus, nous comparons les performances des étudiants avec celles des traducteurs professionnels. La principale différence entre les étudiants et les traducteurs professionnels réside dans le fait que ceux-ci sont mieux en mesure de diviser leur attention et de l’accorder de façon parallèle à la lecture ST (compréhension) et à la production de TT, tandis que les étudiants tendent à alterner la lecture du ST et la rédaction du TT. Enfin, contrairement à ce qui est généralement attendu, nos données révèlent que les UT sont assez grossières, comparativement à la notion d’« atome de traduction », qui coïncide seulement partiellement avec les unités linguistiques.The paper investigates the notion of Translation Units (TUs) from a cognitive angle. A TU is defined as the translator’s focus of attention at a time. Since attention can be directed towards source text (ST) understanding and/or target text (TT) production, we analyze the activity data of the translators’ eye movements and keystrokes. We describe methods to detect patterns of keystrokes (production units) and patterns of gaze fixations on the source text (fixation units) and compare translation performance of student and professional translators. Based on 24 translations from English into Danish of a 160 word text we find major differences between students and professionals: Experienced professional translators are better able to divide their attention in parallel on ST reading (comprehension) and TT production, while students operate more in an alternating mode where they either read the ST or write the TT. In contrast to what is frequently expected, our data reveals that TUs are rather coarse units as compared to the notion of ‘translation atom,’ which coincide only partially with linguistic units

How do measures of cognitive effort relate to each other? A multivariate analysis of post-editing process data

“…Pause data was obtained from PET key-log files by calculating the intervals between any keyboard or mouse activity that resulted in a change in the text (navigation events were disregarded). This is similar to the strategy followed by Carl and Kay (2011) and Green et al (2013). As per , only when these intervals were 300 ms long or more they were considered pauses.…”

Some thoughts about the conceptual / procedural distinction in translation: a key-logging and eye-tracking study of processing effort

“…Jakobsen & Jensen (2008), Pavlovi & Jensen (2009), Hvelplund (2011), Carl & Kay (2011), Carl & Dragsted (2012 and Alves, Gonçalves & Szpak (2012), among others, have shown that eye fixations differ in areas of interest (AOIs, henceforth) found in source and/or target texts and, thus, suggest interesting implications in terms of reading/writing for translation. These authors assume that the allocation of cognitive resources in translation is essentially an information-processing task that can be assessed in real time.…”

Experiments in Non-Coherent Post-editing

“…What constitutes the ideal translation unit has received considerable attention: there are several proposals for a cognitively or linguistically plausible unit (e.g. Dragsted 2005Dragsted , 2006Carl and Kay 2011;Jakobsen 2011;Alves and Gonçalves 2013). However, for the purpose of this study, and practical reasons, we define a translation unit as a sentence (segment) as demarcated by full stops.…”