| Visual interference of source language has imposed a heavy burden on interpreters during sight translation (ST), which will disrupt the allocation of cognitive effort. How interpreters deal with these challenges during ST has been one of the study focuses. Many studies have been devoted to this aspect, but the majority of these studies focus on ST product rather than ST process, and the cognitive activity of ST has been rarely touched upon.The author finds that there have been few studies comparing and discussing eye behaviors of seasoned interpreters and novice interpreters, and few scholars have placed their researches on Chinese-involved interpreting task into the new condition of syntactic disruption.Based on eye-mind hypothesis and the effort model for ST, the author is going to explore the effect of syntactic complexity on the cognitive effort during ST by recording and comparing eye movement behaviors of the interpreters. Guided by a 2 X 2 experiment design, two groups of subjects (the interpreting teachers and interpreting students) were required to do unprepared sight translation of two different texts from English to Chinese. The texts are similar in length, topic and style with no domain-specific words but the syntactic complexity of these texts was manipulated:Text A was syntactically non-complex while Text B is syntactically complex.Results showed that:(1) The reliability of pupil size as an eye movement indicator was to be examined further (2) The syntactic effect exerted a profounder impact on the student interpreters than on the interpreting teachers. Besides, a positive correlation between reading proficiency and interpreting expertise was detected. (3) There were no significant differences between the two groups in terms of eye movement indicators during long and complex sentences processing, but the interpreting teachers made more expression errors than meaning errors while most mistakes made by the student group were meaning failures.This pilot study verifies the feasibility of applying eye-tracking technology to interpreting studies by providing an interpretation of ST process from a cognitive perspective. Eye tracking methodology has offered very intriguing and empirical insights into the cognitive process during ST, which hopefully can invite more relevant researches in the near future. Based on data analysis, this study also concludes some suggestions for ST teaching by emphasizing syntactic difference between source language and target language, and reading skill cultivation. Besides, output quality should be given more weight than task speed at the early stage of ST training. The results have both methodological and pedagogical implications by revealing the cognitive activity in ST.Some limitations of the experiment were presented and suggestions for future related studies were proposed. |
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