Cognitive Effort In C-E Translation In The Light Of Text Typology:An Eye-tracking And Key-logging Study

Cognitive effort is of particular interest in translation to increase understanding of translation process.It serves as an important indicator to explore translator’s cognitive processing and approach the in-depth study of translation facts.Cognitive effort can be affected by translation task at hand,in which the reading and comprehension of source text play a central role.As a consequence,the nature of source text serves as an important element of the research design in cognitive translation.This study attempts to examine cognitive effort in Chinese to English translation for different text types to identify whether different text types could cause different cognitive efforts in C-E translation for translators and which text type shows the highest cognitive effort using measures and indicators of eye tracking and key-logging.Three types of texts have been selected,namely,poetry,legal text,and news which are informative and expressive in respective in accordance of Reiss,text typology(Reiss 2000).The legal text is collected from the Civil Code of China,the first civil code in China.The literary text is extracted from the poem Snowman by Gu Cheng,one of the representative contemporary Chinese poets.The news is chosen from the report in www.xinhuanet.com.Xinhua news agency is China’s official news agency.Selecting the report of the website aims to ensure that experimental material is true,objective and effective.The three texts each consists of 50 characters in Chinese to control the consistency of text length.31 Chinese native speakers participated in the study.They were invited to complete three translation tasks.After the experiment,they were invited to fill out an online survey and assess the translation difficulty on a five-point Likert scale.Data analysis shows:1).Significant difference can be seen in five indicators,including total fixation duration of source text,regression to source text,total translation time,text production efficiency,pause count and a similar trend appears in the attitude of participants on translation difficulty.2).A consistent trend can be seen in all seven indicators,that is legal text has the greatest impact on the participants.Legal text is also rated as the most difficult to translate among the three texts.3).As compare news with poetry,the mean value of five indicators,including pause count,total fixation duration of and regression to source text and total fixation duration of and regression to target text,is shorter as translators were translating news compared with poetry.The text production efficiency in news translation is higher than that in poetry translation.News is also rated as the easiest one to translate among the three texts by participants.4).Total fixation duration of and regression to source text are both significantly and positively correlated to translators’attitude.In this sense,fixation and regression can be two reliable indicators of translators’ cognitive effort.To sum up,the research program presented in this thesis finds that there is significant difference in the cognitive effort caused by different text type in Chinese to English translation.Among the three text types chosen in the present study,including legal text,news and poetry,legal text could cause the highest cognitive effort in translation with poetry in the second place and news in the third place.In addition,based on the correlation analysis,it can be found that fixation and regression can be two reliable indicators of translators’cognitive effort.