What is it about?
Interpreting students and untrained bilinguals with comparable language proficiency were invited to perform three tasks: (1) silent reading (for comprehension); (2) reading aloud (for comprehension); (3) Sight translation. How the participants read the texts and how sight translation is done were investigated. We found that interpreting students chose not to read through the text but rather began sight-translating it almost immediately, while many more untrained bilinguals tended to engage in thorough normal reading first. However, the students still managed to finish the sight translation task much faster with better quality, both reaching statistical significance. The secret to the students' success lies in language flexibility. From the very beginning, they started producing output whenever they found a meaning unit along the way, thereby chunking the text at hand into really short segments, and were successful in tackling each segment one by one rapidly.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
One of the first studies to explore the cognitive process of sight translation with local eye movement indices for reading.
Perspectives
Most of the previous research on the same topic either rely on output analysis or resort to more glocal reading indices, such as the number and average length of fixations (and regressions), and the task time. This study looks into different reading stages with more refined indices and uses a variety of output data to complement the analysis.
Chen-En Ho
Queen's University Belfast
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: How does training shape English-Chinese sight translation behaviour?, Translation Cognition & Behavior, May 2020, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/tcb.00032.ho.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
