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Article published In:
Target
Vol. 31:1 (2019) ► pp.125–149

Measuring the difficulty of text translation

The combination of text-focused and translator-oriented approaches

| Shandong University of Finance and Economics
ORCID logo | Durham University
| Durham University

This paper explores the impact of text complexity on translators’ subjective perception of translation difficulty and on their cognitive load. Twenty-six MA translation students from a UK university were asked to translate three English texts with different complexity into Chinese. Their eye movements were recorded by an eye-tracker, and their cognitive load was self-assessed with a Likert scale before translation and NASA-TLX scales after translation. The results show that: (i) the intrinsic complexity measured by readability, word frequency and non-literalness was in line with the results received from informants’ subjective assessment of translation difficulty; (ii) moderate and positive correlations existed between most items in the self-assessments and the indicator (fixation and saccade durations) obtained by the eye-tracking measurements; and (iii) the informants’ cognitive load as indicated by fixation and saccade durations (but not for pupil size) increased significantly in two of the three texts along with the increase in source text complexity.

Keywords: text complexity, translation difficulty, cognitive load, eye-tracking, self-assessment
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Measuring cognitive load
  • 3.Research design
    • 3.1Informants
    • 3.2Materials
    • 3.3Experimental settings
    • 3.4Experimental procedure
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Quality assessment of eye-tracking data
    • 4.2Subjective measurements
      • 4.2.1Pre-translation rating
      • 4.2.2Post-translation rating
    • 4.3Physiological measurements
      • 4.3.1Fixation and saccade duration (FSD)
      • 4.3.2Pupil dilation
    • 4.4The link between subjective and physiological measurements
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Quantitative text measurements
    • 5.2Physiological measurements
    • 5.3Subjective judgements
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 January 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.18036.zhe
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