Arnt Lykke Jakobsen

On the basis of a pilot study using speech recognition (SR) software, this chapter attempts to illustrate the benefits of adopting an interdisciplinary approach in translator training. It shows how the collaboration between phoneticians, translators and interpreters can (1) advance research, (2) have implications for the curriculum, (3) be pedagogically motivating, and (4) prepare students for employing translation technology in their future practice as translators. In a two-phase study in which 14 MA students translated texts in three modalities (sight, written, and oral translation using an SR program), Translog was employed to measure task times. The quality of the products was assessed by three experienced translators, and the number and types of misrecognitions were identified by a phonetician. Results indicate that SR translation provides a potentially useful supplement to written translation, or indeed an alternative to it.

The development and current state of translation process research chArnt Lykke Jakobsen Copenhagen Business School lInterest in process-oriented translation studies has been intense for the past almost half a century. Translation process research (TPR) is the label we have used to refer to a special descriptive, empirical, experimental approach to translation studies based on close, technology-supported observation of translational (micro)behaviour. Fundamentally, TPR is based on software which logs a translator’s keystrokes on a computer keyboard in time in combination with an eyetracker which simultaneously tracks the translator’s eye movements across a screen displaying both a source text and the translator’s emerging translation. This research method was developed as a means of qualifying and strengthening translation process hypotheses based on verbal reports by providing additional, different, quantitative data from the same events, on the basis of which supplementary analyses and interpretations could be derived. With this method, many processes can be directly observed at different levels of granularity and can be compared with reported features of the mental process, which itself remains inaccessible to outside observation. What mental processes underlie measurable (micro)behaviour can only be inferred. A multi-methodological approach is clearly called for in order to capture the full complexity of translation, and translation studies must be open to extend its curiosity beyond itself, into regions like cognitive psychology, psycho- and neurolinguistics, and neuroscience, where the interest in what goes on in our heads is also very strong.

Although keylogging opens up many possibilities for studying translation processes, the addition of eye tracking vastly increases our ability to know what kind of process a translator engages in at any given point in time. Following a description of how the Translog software was technologically reshaped in the context of the EU Eye-to-IT project to be able to integrate keylogging and eye tracking, and of how raw eye and key data were represented, an analysis of a small sample of eye and key data results will be presented in a tentative formulation of a recurrent six-step processing micro-cycle which introduces the “anchor” word as a novel concept. It is optimistically suggested that an elementary cycle of the kind suggested could both function as the basis of computational analysis of large volumes of translational eye and key data and potentially as the core of a computational model of human translation.

We tracked the eye movements of 18 students as they translated three short texts with different complexity levels under three different time constraints. Participants with touch typing skills were found to attend more to on-screen text than participants without touch typing skills. Time pressure was found to mainly affect fixations on the source text, and text complexity was found to only affect the number of fixations on the source text. Overall, it was found that average fixation duration was longer in the target text area than in the source text area.

Article Instances of Peak Performance in Translation was published on July 1, 2005 in the journal Lebende Sprachen (volume 50, issue 3).