| The present empirical research is a comparative study of pause behaviors of MTI and Non-MTI participants with three-level language competence in Chinese(L1)-English(L2)translation by triangulating multiple data recorded and calculated by Translog-Ⅱ,NASA-TLX scales and TAPs.This research proposes the following three research questions:(1)What is the overall pause performance of the informants with different majors and language competence?(2)Where do the informants pause in each comparative group?(3)Why do the informants pause and what are the differences in each comparison?Closely pertaining to the research questions,the research content of this research include the overall performance of the pauses,the location and duration of the pauses and the reasons for the pauses.The research method is triangulation,including not only the analysis of statistics,pause plot,linear view and other objective data in the Translog-Ⅱ software,but the analysis of subjective data such as the participants’ verbal reports and their self-assessed values of overall workload.For the data analysis,this study follows the principles of comparative analysis and conducts the intra-group analysis of the MTI group,the intra-group analysis of the Non-MTI group,and the comparative analysis of the MTI and Non-MTI informants respectively.A general description of the research design is: 6 MTI postgraduates and 6Non-MTI postgraduate varying in TEM-4 scores ranked A/B/C were recruited as informants.They were asked to translate a warm-up text and a 200-word text sourced from CATTI-3 from Chinese(L1)into English(L2)in the Translog-Ⅱ user interface with their pause behaviors recorded in Translog-Ⅱ supervisor interface.With the translation experiment finished,they were required to verbally report what they were thinking about during the process especially about why they paused as watching their behaviors in translation recorded in the Replay section.Their verbal reports were recorded in the voice-recording software and transcribed into words by transcribing software.In addition,an online questionnaire guided by NASA-TLX scales was demanded to be filled out by all the informants to calculate their overall workload.In accordance with the research design,all the collected data are analyzed comparatively according to different categories of comparison for the experimental purposes.The research findings are shown as follows:(1)The overall pause performance of the MTI group is better than that of the Non-MTI group,indicating that the MTI informants have higher translation fluency;(2)The MTI informants with better language competence are inclined to pause at the textual conception and the sentence-to-sentence connection,while those with inferior language competence tend to pause at vocabulary expression,grammatical usage and spelling errors;on the contrary,in the Non-MTI group,the result is exactly the opposite;(3)The reasons for the pauses in the MTI group and the Non-MTI group show no much difference,which are mainly caused by reading and understanding the source text,conceiving the sentence structure and considering the appropriate expressions.In addition to the above three research findings based on the proposed research questions,this research also explores all the participants’ overall workload value and the degree of impact of the two variables.It is found that:(4)The values of the overall workload in MTI group are all less than those of the Non-MTI group;(5)Major and language competence have different importance weight for different data.The findings of this empirical study process academic and practical value.This research not only allows the subsequent pause behavior studies for reference in data,but also captures novel insights for the future empirical investigation of the translation process.Additionally,it throws light on the teaching of translation and the training of translators. |
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