- Home
- e-Journals
- Translation, Cognition & Behavior
- Previous Issues
- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2021
Translation, Cognition & Behavior - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2021
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2021
-
Does it help to see the speaker’s lip movements?
Author(s): Anne Catherine Gieshoffpp.: 1–25 (25)More LessAbstractSimultaneous interpreting combines auditory and visual information. Within a multitude of visual inputs that interpreters receive, the one from the speaker seems to be particularly important (Bühler 1985; Seubert 2019). One reason might be that lip movements enhance speech perception and might thus reduce cognitive load in simultaneous interpreting and hence, induce lower mental effort. This effect may be even more pronounced when noise is added to the source speech. This study was conducted to investigate cognitive load and mental effort during simultaneous interpreting (a) with and without the ability to see speaker’s lip movements, and (b) with and without interfering noise. A group of listeners was included to control for task-related effects. Mental effort and cognitive load were measured using pupillometry, interpreting accuracy measures, and subjective reports. The facilitation hypothesis for lip movements was not confirmed. However, the pupillometric data suggests that lip movements may increase arousal.
-
The role of working memory capacity in interpreting performance
Author(s): Munjung Bae and Cheol Ja Jeongpp.: 26–46 (21)More LessAbstractThis study aims to examine the relationship between working memory (WM) capacity and the performance of student interpreters defined as the quality of their interpreting output. To measure WM capacity, we administered Korean and English reading span tasks, and an operation span task. The WM scores were analysed for correlation with simultaneous interpreting (SI) and consecutive interpreting (CI) scores. The results were mixed: (1) the CI score showed no correlation with any of the WM span tasks and (2) the SI score correlated with only one WM span task, the operation span task. Given that the participants received shorter training in SI than in CI, we can tentatively conclude that interpreting performance is influenced more by WM capacity when the interpreter performs a less familiar type of interpreting. Further research is needed to find out why the reading span tasks and the operation span task showed different relationships with SI.
-
What does professional experience have to offer?
Author(s): Chen-En Hopp.: 47–73 (27)More LessAbstractThis study investigated the impact of professional experience on the process and product of sight interpreting/translation (SiT). Seventeen experienced interpreters, with at least 150 days’ professional experience, and 18 interpreting students were recruited to conduct three tasks: silent reading, reading aloud, and SiT. All participants had similar interpreter training backgrounds. The data of the SiT task are reported here, with two experienced interpreters (both AIIC members) assessing the participants’ interpretations on accuracy and style, which includes fluency and other paralinguistic performance. The findings show that professional experience contributed to higher accuracy, although there was no between-group difference in the mean score on style, overall task time, length of the SiT output, and mean fixation duration of each stage of reading. The experienced practitioners exhibited more varied approaches at the beginning of the SiT task, with some biding their time longer than the others before oral production started, but quality was not affected. Moving along, the practitioners showed better language flexibility in that their renditions were faster, steadier, and less disrupted by pauses and the need to read further to maintain the flow of interpretation.
-
The potential benefits of subtitles for enhancing language acquisition and literacy in children
Author(s): Sharon Blackpp.: 74–97 (24)More LessAbstractWhile a considerable body of experimental work has been conducted since the beginning of the 1980s to study whether subtitles enhance the acquisition of other languages in adults, research of this type investigating subtitles as a tool for enhancing children’s language learning and literacy has received less attention. This study provides an integrative review of existing studies in this area and finds extensive evidence that subtitled AV content can indeed aid the acquisition of other languages in children and adolescents, and that it can moreover enhance the literacy skills of children learning to read in their L1 or the official language of the country in which they live and receive schooling. Recommendations for future research are also made, and it is highlighted that further research using eye tracking to measure children’s gaze behaviour could shed new light on their attention to and processing of subtitled AV content.
-
Literal is not always easier
Author(s): Miguel A. Jiménez-Crespo and Joseph V. Casillaspp.: 98–123 (26)More LessAbstract“Literal translation” is a popular construct in Translation Studies. Research from computational approaches has consistently shown that non-literal translations, i.e., renderings semantically and syntactically different or not close to the source text, are more difficult or effortful to produce than literal ones. This paper researches whether literal translations are systematically less effortful to process than non-literal ones using comparable corpus data. The effort incurred in processing literal translations from a parallel corpus is compared to that of processing the most frequent non-literal renderings found in previous comparable corpus studies. Ten professional translators edited a text using a mock translation environment setup using the keylogger Inputlog. The task was presented as a regular editing process with a full cohesive text presented segment pair by segment pair. Time served as a proxy for overall cognitive effort. We analyzed time from presentation to type (TTP) and time to completion of segment edit (TC), or complete editing events. Results showed that processing efforts are indistinguishable between categories, suggesting that cognitive effort to edit non-literal default translation candidates is not always higher when compared to the most frequent literal translations from a parallel corpus.
-
Translator autonomy in the age of behavioural data
Author(s): Lucas Nunes Vieira, Valentina Ragni and Elisa Alonsopp.: 124–146 (23)More LessAbstractTranslation behaviour is increasingly tracked to benchmark productivity, to calculate pay or to automate project management decisions. Although in many cases these practices are commonplace, their effects are surprisingly under-researched. This article investigates the consequences of activity tracking in commercial translation. It reports on a series of focus-group interviews involving sixteen translators who used productivity tools to independently monitor their work for a period of sixteen weeks. Our analysis revealed several ways in which the act of tracking activity can itself influence translators’ working practices. We examine translators’ conceptualisations of productivity and discuss the findings as a matter of translator autonomy. The article calls for further awareness of individual and collective consequences of monitoring translation behaviour. Although in some contexts translators found activity tracking to be useful, we argue that client-controlled tracking and translator autonomy are in most cases incompatible.
Most Read This Month

-
-
Six-second rule revisited
Author(s): Agnieszka Szarkowska and Lidia Bogucka
-
-
-
MT Literacy—A cognitive view
Author(s): Sharon O’Brien and Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow
-
-
-
‘Default’ translation
Author(s): Sandra L. Halverson
-
- More Less