Translation/Interpreting psychological mechanism as embodied bilingual processing

Based on the psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research on bilingualism, this paper firstly discusses three fundamental models and relevant central issues involved in the bilingual processing of interpreting: the selective and non-selective feature of bilingual access and control, the serial and parallel view of bilingual processing, and the coordination view of serial and parallel procedure of bilingual information processing, with the dual purpose of explicating the bilingual processing and cognitive control mechanism in the interpreting process and paving the way for further explanation of the embodied nature of bilingual processing in interpreting from the embodied cognition perspective. Then with the two aspects of processing mechanism and neurolinguistic evidence, it elaborates how the interpreter’s embodied experience and skills in the profession, as a part of cognitive resources, play crucial roles in different levels of cognitive processing which coordinates the serial and parallel processing in the interpreting process. Lastly, this paper argues for viewing the translating process likewise as embodied bilingual processing using a brief comparison between translating and interpreting with a focus on the embodied nature of bilingual processing in their respective processes.

Norms, affect and evaluation in the reception of literary translations in multilingual online reading communities

This article uses the Digital Opinions on Translated Literature (dioptra-l) corpus to study readers’ perceptions of and responses to translation in a naturalistic setting, focusing on the normative constructs or cognitive-evaluative templates they use to conceptualise, evaluate and respond to translations. We answer two main questions: (1) How visible, or salient, is the fact of translation to readers reading a translated literary text, and are there differences in the degree and nature of this visibility for different languages and translation directions? (2) What are the main concepts, and emotional and evaluative parameters that readers use to describe translated literary texts, and are there differences in these concepts and parameters when considered by different translation directionalities and genres? We make use of computational methods, including collocational network analysis, keyword analysis, and sentiment analysis to extract information about the salience of translation, and the networks of emotive and evaluative language that are used around the concept of translation. This forms the basis of our proposals for particular cognitive-evaluative templates.

A systematic reviewof experimental researchin audiovisual translation 1992–2020

This study systematically reviewed 61 experimental studies on audiovisual translation (AVT), published in academic journals between 1992 and 2020. The review examined five aspects of these studies: publication trends, research scopes, research designs, statistical procedures, and reporting practices. Major findings include: (a) there has been a slight concentration of publication outlets for experimental AVT research; (b) the focal studies could be categorized into three themes (product, process, and pedagogy), with the product theme being the most popular and subtitling the dominant AVT modality; (c) the inclusion of a comparison group was the most common design feature, and questionnaires and tests were the most popular research instruments; (d) inferential statistical analysis was favored over descriptive statistical analysis; (e) data normality information and effect sizes were not regularly reported. Based on the systematic review, suggestions are made for the future development of experimental AVT research.

Effects of subtitle speed on proportional reading time

How much time do viewers spend reading subtitles and does it depend on the subtitle speed? By posing these questions, in this paper we re-analyse previous data to address this issue while promoting two methodological advancements in eye-tracking audiovisual research: (1) the use of proportional reading time (PRT) as a metric of time spent on subtitle reading and (2) the analysis of data via linear mixed models (LMMs). We tested 19 Polish L1 viewers with advanced English proficiency watching two clips with English soundtrack with Polish subtitles. First, we compared PRT at two different subtitle speeds: 12 characters per second (cps) and 20 cps. Then, we used actual subtitle speed rates to better understand the speed-PRT relationship. The results showed a significantly higher PRT for 20 cps compared to 12 cps, with the models predicting a PRT of 45.24% at 20 cps. We have also found strong evidence of the advantage of LMMs over more commonly used statistical techniques.

The ‘hookability’of multimodal impact captions

The use of captions has grown in recent years in both traditional and new media, particularly in terms of the diversity of style, content, and function. Impact captions have emerged as a popular form of captions for hearing viewers and contain rich multimodal information which is employed to capture viewer attention and enhance engagement, particularly in situations where there is competition for viewer attention. Drawing upon relevance theory, we argue how impact captions could effectively attract and hold visual attention owing to their balance between processing effort and contextual effects. This exploratory study employs a dual-task paradigm and uses authentic materials and viewing situations to further examine the ability of multimodal impact captions to attract and retain overt visual attention amongst a small sample of TV viewers. Our results provide novel insight into the apparent highly individualised efficacy of impact captions, where we identify several variables of interest in participants’ viewing behaviours. We conclude with a discussion of the study’s contributions, limitations, and an outline for future work.

Towards a higher order thinking skills-oriented translation competence model

This article aims at exploring translation competence (TC) from the perspective of higher-order thinking skills (HOTS), and developing a HOTS-oriented TC model accordingly. The underlying assumption is that the translation competence needed to solve ill-structured translation problems is highly integrated HOTS in essence. Based on this assumption, a framework for HOTS-oriented TC is presented, using features from the PACTE group’s TC model, and combining it with HOTS-specific features. Subsequently, a HOTS-oriented TC model is constructed, which consists of three interrelated parts: HOTS (i.e., translation problem-solving ability, translation decision-making ability, translation creative-thinking ability, and translation critical thinking ability); translation knowledge, and translation thinking dispositions. Additionally, two other assumptions are made as scaffolding to support our HOTS-oriented TC model. Finally, implications for TC studies and translation pedagogy are provided.

Translator autonomy in the age of behavioural data

Translation behaviour is increasingly tracked to benchmark productivity, to calculate pay or to automate project management decisions. Although in many cases these practices are commonplace, their effects are surprisingly under-researched. This article investigates the consequences of activity tracking in commercial translation. It reports on a series of focus-group interviews involving sixteen translators who used productivity tools to independently monitor their work for a period of sixteen weeks. Our analysis revealed several ways in which the act of tracking activity can itself influence translators’ working practices. We examine translators’ conceptualisations of productivity and discuss the findings as a matter of translator autonomy. The article calls for further awareness of individual and collective consequences of monitoring translation behaviour. Although in some contexts translators found activity tracking to be useful, we argue that client-controlled tracking and translator autonomy are in most cases incompatible.

The potential benefits of subtitles for enhancing language acquisition and literacy in children

While a considerable body of experimental work has been conducted since the beginning of the 1980s to study whether subtitles enhance the acquisition of other languages in adults, research of this type investigating subtitles as a tool for enhancing children’s language learning and literacy has received less attention. This study provides an integrative review of existing studies in this area and finds extensive evidence that subtitled AV content can indeed aid the acquisition of other languages in children and adolescents, and that it can moreover enhance the literacy skills of children learning to read in their L1 or the official language of the country in which they live and receive schooling. Recommendations for future research are also made, and it is highlighted that further research using eye tracking to measure children’s gaze behaviour could shed new light on their attention to and processing of subtitled AV content.

Literal is not always easier

“Literal translation” is a popular construct in Translation Studies. Research from computational approaches has consistently shown that non-literal translations, i.e., renderings semantically and syntactically different or not close to the source text, are more difficult or effortful to produce than literal ones. This paper researches whether literal translations are systematically less effortful to process than non-literal ones using comparable corpus data. The effort incurred in processing literal translations from a parallel corpus is compared to that of processing the most frequent non-literal renderings found in previous comparable corpus studies. Ten professional translators edited a text using a mock translation environment setup using the keylogger Inputlog. The task was presented as a regular editing process with a full cohesive text presented segment pair by segment pair. Time served as a proxy for overall cognitive effort. We analyzed time from presentation to type (TTP) and time to completion of segment edit (TC), or complete editing events. Results showed that processing efforts are indistinguishable between categories, suggesting that cognitive effort to edit non-literal default translation candidates is not always higher when compared to the most frequent literal translations from a parallel corpus.

The role of working memory capacityin interpreting performance

This study aims to examine the relationship between working memory (WM) capacity and the performance of student interpreters defined as the quality of their interpreting output. To measure WM capacity, we administered Korean and English reading span tasks, and an operation span task. The WM scores were analysed for correlation with simultaneous interpreting (SI) and consecutive interpreting (CI) scores. The results were mixed: (1) the CI score showed no correlation with any of the WM span tasks and (2) the SI score correlated with only one WM span task, the operation span task. Given that the participants received shorter training in SI than in CI, we can tentatively conclude that interpreting performance is influenced more by WM capacity when the interpreter performs a less familiar type of interpreting. Further research is needed to find out why the reading span tasks and the operation span task showed different relationships with SI.