Measuring the difficulty of text translation: The combination of text-focused and translator-oriented approaches
Abstract
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.
Publication history
Table of contents
The significance of measuring the difficulty of a source text for translation pedagogy and research has received some attention in the past two decades (e.g., Hale and Campbell 2002; Jensen 2009; Mishra, Bhattacharyya, and Carl 2013; Sun and Shreve 2014). To investigate the degree of translation difficulty caused by the variable text complexity, researchers have based their examinations either on readability alone (Pavlović and Jensen 2009), or on a combination of readability and other indicators, such as word frequency, sentence structure and non-literalness (Sharmin, Spakov, Räihä, and Jakobsen 2008; Jensen 2009). Measurement has generally been centred around the level of text complexity – for instance, character length, syllable length and sentence length – while ignoring other important factors, such as conceptual complexity, text organisation, or reader’s background knowledge (Liu and Chiu 2011, 149). Nevertheless, the textual factors can account only partially for the text’s level of translation difficulty (Sun and Shreve 2014, 98), since the construct of translation difficulty originates from the interaction between task and its translator. Therefore, translation difficulty should be measured in both texts and the profiles of translators working with the texts.
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