Literality and cognitive effort: Japanese and Spanish

Abstract

We introduce a notion of pause-word ratio computed using ranges of pause lengths rather than lower cutoffs for pause lengths. Standard pause-word ratios are indicators of cognitive effort during different translation modalities.The pause range version allows for the study of how different types of pauses relate to the extent of cognitive effort and where it occurs in the translation process. In this article we focus on short monitoring pauses and how they relate to the cognitive effort involved in translation and post-editing for language pairs that are different in terms of semantic and syntactic remoteness. We use data from the CRITT TPR database, comparing translation and post-editing from English to Japanese and from English to Spanish, and study the interaction of pause-word ratio for short pauses ranging between 300 and 500ms with syntactic remoteness, measured by the CrossS feature, semantic remoteness, measured by HTra, and syntactic and semantic remoteness, measured by Literality.

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