Outline for a Relevance Theoretical Model of Machine Translation Post-editing

Translation process research (TPR) has advanced in the recent years to a state which allows us to study “in great detail what source and target text units are being processed, at a given point in time, to investigate what steps are involved in this process, what segments are read and aligned and how this whole process is monitored” (Alves 2015, p. 32). We have sophisticated statistical methods and with the powerful tools to produce a better and more detailed understanding of the underlying cognitive processes that are involved in translation. Following Jakobsen (2011), who suspects that we may soon be in a situation which allows us to develop a computational model of human translation, Alve…

Comparing the Quality of Neural Machine Translation and Professional Post-Editing

This empirical corpus study explores the quality of neural machine translations (NMT) and their post-edits (NMTPE) at the German Department of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) by evaluating NMT outputs, NMTPE, and respective revisions (REV) with the automatic error annotation tool Hjerson (Popovic 2011) and the more fine-grained manual MQM framework (Lommel 2014). Results show that quality assurance measures by post-editors and revisors at the DGT are most often necessary for lexical errors. More specifically, if post-editors correct mistranslations, terminology or stylistic errors in an NMT sentence, revisors are likely to correct the same type of error i…

‘Monitoring’ in translation

Abstract We assume that visual feedback from the written trace during translation plays an important role in monitoring the emerging translation. In this study, 44 participants translated with and without visual feedback from the target text (TT). Numerous measures were used to explore the differences between the texts that were created in the two conditions and the characteristics of the task performance in the two conditions. The impact of ST-TT semantic and syntactic relationships showed that there were differences on two of three behavioural measures across conditions. In the comparison of features of the translation process, findings show that ST reading times were longer without visua…

Cognitive Effort and Efficiency in Translation Revision

Empirical studies of revision are often based on either think aloud protocols, interviews, or observational methods. Eye tracking and keylogging methods are rarely applied to the study of revision behavior. The authors employ established methods from translation process research (TPR) to study the eye movement and typing behavior during self-revision (i.e., the phase in the translation process that follows a first complete draft). The authors measure the effect of behavior during the drafting phase on the relative revision duration. Relative revision duration is the time translators spend revising the first complete draft of the source text. They find that the most efficient process involve…

Why Translation Is Difficult

The paper develops a definition of translation literality that is based on the syntactic and semantic similarity of the source and the target texts. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that absolute literal translations are easy to produce. Based on a multilingual corpus of alternative translations we investigate the effects of cross-lingual syntactic and semantic distance on translation production times and find that non-literality makes from-scratch translation and post-editing difficult. We show that statistical machine translation systems encounter even more difficulties with non-literality.

Syntactic Variance and Priming Effects in Translation

The present work investigates the relationship between syntactic variation and priming in translation. It is based on the claim that languages share a common cognitive network of neural activity. When the source and target languages are solicited in a translation context, this shared network can lead to facilitation effects, so-called priming effects. We suggest that priming is a default setting in translation, a special case of language use where source and target languages are constantly co-activated. Such priming effects are not restricted to lexical elements, but do also occur on the syntactic level. We tested these hypotheses with translation data from the TPR database, more specifical…

The Development of the TPR-DB as Grounded Theory Method

Abstract Initial versions of the translation process research database (TPR-DB), were released around 2011 in an attempt to integrate translation process data from several until then individually collected and scattered translation research projects. While the earlier individual studies had a clear focus on quantitative assessment of well-defined research questions on cognitive processes in human translation production, the integration of the data into the TPR-DB allowed for broader qualitative and exploratory research which has led to new codes, categories and research themes. In a constant effort to develop and refine the emerging concepts and categories and to validate the developing the…

Predictive Turn in Translation Studies: Review and Prospects

Comparing the Effect of Product-Based Metrics on the Translation Process

Characteristics of the translation product are often used in translation process research as predictors for cognitive load, and by extension translation difficulty. In the last decade, user-activity information such as eye-tracking data has been increasingly employed as an experimental tool for that purpose. In this paper, we take a similar approach. We look for significant effects that different predictors may have on three different eye-tracking measures: First Fixation Duration (duration of first fixation on a token), Eye-Key Span (duration between first fixation on a token and the first keystroke contributing to its translation), and Total Reading Time on source tokens (sum of fixations…

Chapter 3. Measuring translation literality

The Translation and Interpreting Competence Questionnaire: an online tool for research on translators and interpreters

Despite the growth of research on translation and interpreting, measures of competence in such activities typically stem from informal, non-validated instruments. This scenario casts doubts on the ...

Experiments in Non-Coherent Post-editing

Market pressure on translation productivity joined with technological innovation is likely to fragment and decontextualise translation jobs even more than is cur-rently the case. Many different translators increasingly work on one document at different places, collaboratively working in the cloud. This paper investigates the effect of decontextualised source texts on behaviour by comparing post-editing of sequentially ordered sentences with shuffled sentences from two different texts. The findings suggest that there is little or no effect of the decontextualised source texts on behaviour.

Eye-tracking revision processes of translation students and professional translators

Great effort has been made to define and to measure revision competence in translation. However, combined eye tracking and keylogging have hardly been applied in revision research. We believe it is...

Models of the Translation Process

Towards a methodological toolset for the psycholinguistics of translation

Abstract The manuscript provides readers with a basic methodological toolset for experimental psycholinguistic studies on translation. Following a description of key methodological concepts and the rationale behind experimental designs in psycholinguistics, we discuss experimental paradigms adopted from bilingualism research, which potentially constitute a methodological foundation for studies investigating the psycholinguistics of translation. Specifically, we show that priming paradigms possess several inherent advantages which make them particularly suitable for research on translation. The manuscript critically discusses key methodological problems associated with such paradigms and ill…