Prezentacja: 10 Kongres European Society for Translation Studies

The proof of the translation process is in the reading of the target text: testing the effectiveness of the translator’s keystrokes with the reader’s eye movements

22 June 2022

The translator’s decisions and language use are vital for the reader’s meaning making process (Alves & Jakobsen 2020, Chesterman 1998). Yet, studies exploring the relationship between the translation process and product, including the effect on the target reader are scarce. In this presentation we offer a novel way of testing the effectiveness of the translator’s decisions visible in the keylogging data by looking
at the eye movements of the target text readers (Walker 2019). For this purpose, we asked 20 university students to read the translations of a product description text and decide whether they would feel encouraged to buy the product described in the text. The translations were produced by professional translators in our previous project and we have complete records of the process (Whyatt 2019). We
analysed the reader’s eye movements recorded by the EyeLink 1000 Plus and searched for correspondences between the ease or difficulty recorded in the eye-tracking record (fixation duration, re-fixations, gaze time) and the translator’s keylogging data (fluent typing, pauses and deletions). Our aim is to see: 1) whether the translator’s effort paid off and the reader does not display difficulty when
reading the final text as indicated by long fixations and re-fixations; 2) if the easy stretches of text production correlate with the ease of reading; 3) how translation and language errors affect the reading and reception of translated texts (Rayner and Liversedge 2011). We also conducted brief interviews with the participants to supplement the eye movement data with their subjective account of the reading
experience. This exploratory study is a part of the Read Me project which aims to advance our understanding of the relationship between the translation process and the reading experience of the target readership. The reception of translated language remains a very much unexplored area in cognitive translation studies.

Alves, Fabio and Arnt Jakobsen. 2020. “Grounding Cognitive Translation Studies: Goals, commitments and challenges,” in: Fabio Alves and Arnt Lykke Jakobsen. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Cognition. New York: Routledge, 545-554.

Chesterman, Andrew. 1998. “Causes, Translations, Effects,” Target 10, 2: 201–230.

Rayner, Keith and Simon P. Liversedge. 2011. “Linguistic and cognitive influences on eye movements during reading,” in Simon P. Liversedge, Iain D. Gilchrist, and Stefan Everling (eds.): The Oxford handbook of eye movements. New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press, 751–766.

Walker, Callum. 2019. “A cognitive perspective on equivalent effect: using eye tracking to measure equivalence in source text and target text cognitive effects on readers,” Perspectives 27, 1: 124–143.

Whyatt Bogusława. 2019. “In search of directionality effects in the translation process and in the end product,” Translation, Cognition & Behavior 2, 1: 79–100