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Translation in Transition: Between cognition, computing and technology
Edited by Arnt Lykke Jakobsen and Bartolomé Mesa-Lao
[Benjamins Translation Library 133] 2017
► pp. 81–105

Chapter 3
Measuring translation literality

| CRITT, Copenhagen Business School/Renmin University of China
| Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Tirkkonen-Condit (2005: 407–408) argues that “It looks as if literal translation is [the result of] a default rendering procedure”. As a corollary, more literal translations should be easier to process, and less literal ones should be associated with more cognitive effort. In order to assess this hypothesis, we operationalize translation literality as 1. the word-order similarity of the source and the target text and 2. the number of possible different translation renderings. We develop a literality metric and apply it on a set of manually word and sentence aligned alternative translations. Drawing on the monitor hypothesis (Tirkkonen-Condit 2005) and a model of shared syntax (Hartsuiker et al. 2004) we develop a model of translation effort based on priming strength: shared combinatorial nodes and meaning representations are activated through automatized bilingual priming processes where more strongly activated nodes lead to less effortful translation production. The theoretical framework explains the observed production- and reading times and justifies our literality metric.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Defining translation literality
    • 2.1Crossing alignments
    • 2.2Translation perplexity
  • 3.Experimental material
  • 4.Word translation perplexity and translation priming
    • 4.1Translation priming and translation choices
    • 4.2Gaze durations and translation perplexity
    • 4.3Combinatorial nodes and shared representations
  • 5.Crossing alignments and the translation process
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 September 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.133.03car
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