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10th International Symposium on Cognitive Studies in Translation

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The last several decades have witnessed mounting researches on translators’ allocation of cognitive efforts in translation process based on eye tracking. This research analyzes six eye-movement measures of 54 participants to investigate how translators’ cognitive efforts are modulated by translation phases (i.e. Pre-translation, Translation, Post-translation, the First Phase and the Second Phase of Translation), translation subtasks (i.e. ST: source texts, TT: target texts, and C: dictionary consultation), and text difficulty (i.e. difficult text: text D and easier text: text E) in naturalistic translation.

The results reveal complicated separate and interactive modulations of translation phases, subtasks, and text difficulty on translators’ distribution of cognitive efforts in naturalistic translation: (1) In terms of the modulation of translation phases, Translation demands longer total fixation duration & average fixation duration, more fixation count, larger average pupil size, and greater cognitive intensity & workloads than Post-translation, followed by Pre-translation; and the First Phase of Translation consumes longer total fixation duration, more fixation count, and greater cognitive workloads than the Second Phase. (2) Regarding the influence of translation subtasks, ST and TT consume longer total fixation & more fixation count than C; TT and C need larger pupil size & greater cognitive intensity to process than ST; and ST and TT demand greater cognitive workloads than C. (3) As for the effect of text difficulty, text D needs more cognitive efforts to process than text E, as is indicated by average pupil size. (4) The above three factors interactively influence translators’ allocation of cognitive efforts more or less. Underlying the above modulations, the central executive of translators’ working memory proactively allocates their attention and efforts to different translation phases, tasks, and text versions. What is more, a processing slow-down of the working memory caused by fatigue due to temporal change, different cognitive subtasks in different translation subtasks, text familiarity, keyboard familiarity, and low-frequency words play separate and interactive roles in modulating how translators distribute their cognitive efforts to different phases, subtasks, and texts versions.

For the implication of this research, it contributes to studies on translators’ allocation of cognitive efforts to spatial and temporal dimensions, and it sheds new light on the latter aspect.

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Conference

Title10th International Symposium on Cognitive Studies in Translation<br/>
Date15/11/2418/11/24
LocationMacao
CityMacao
PlaceMacao
Degree of recognitionInternational event