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Translation in Transition: Human and machine intelligence
Edited by Isabel Lacruz
[American Translators Association Scholarly Monograph Series XX] 2023
► pp. 236–256

Chapter 11
Early processes in reading for translation

A micro-scale study in the CRITT TPR-DB

| University of California, San Diego
| Kent State University

Synonyms in a target language are a source of ambiguity in translation production. This ambiguity can be quantified by the translation entropy metric and used to assess predictions by different models on the time course of target language activation in the translation process. Aggregated data from several language pairs and translation modalities reveal a correlation between translation entropy and eye tracking metrics, providing evidence of early target language activation during translation tasks. We examine published data from CRITT to investigate whether this correlation remains present in the single Spanish-English language pair. We confirm previous findings when all translation modalities are aggregated, but present evidence that early target language activation may vary across different translation modalities in the Spanish-English language pair.

Keywords: cross-linguistic ambiguity, translation entropy, language activation, translation process research, eye tracking, CRITT TPR-DB, BML12
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Monolingual language processing and ambiguity resolution
    • 1.2Bilingual language processing and ambiguity resolution
      • 1.2.1The Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM)
      • 1.2.2The BIA+ model
      • 1.2.3Evidence for non-selectivity in bi/multilingual language processing
    • 1.3Models of translation processes
      • 1.3.1Vertical and horizontal models
      • 1.3.2The monitor and recursive models
      • 1.3.3Early processes in reading for translation
  • 2.The present research
    • 2.1Method
    • 2.2Measures specific to from-scratch translation
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Results
    • 2.5Discussion
  • 3.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ata.xx.11nev
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