Translation as a writing process: Pauses in translation versus monolingual text production

This paper is an empirical study on pause patterns in fluent translation and monolingual text production. By comparing pauses recorded from both processes, it discovered two temporal features: Firstly, the mean length of pause at textual category boundaries grew the higher the category was in the syntactic hierarchy. Secondly, the length of pause at clause level or lower were on average longer in translation than in monolingual text production, whereas pauses above clause level tended to be shorter in translation. Besides the differences in pause duration, translation also affected the use of total production time. Translation requires on average a longer revision and monitoring phase while the drafting phase is completed more quickly. Both writing tasks used approximately the same proportion of time for the orientation phase.