Cognitive Mechanism Of The Translator’s Anxiety In L1-L2 Translation:An Eye-tracking Study

In the process of language acquisition,in addition to cognitive factors,affective factors also play a great role.As one of the most important affective factors,anxiety has a great influence on language acquisition.Foreign language anxiety is produced in a specific environment.That is,as long as individuals are in a foreign language environment,they will have foreign language anxiety,and this anxiety will have a significant impact on foreign language learners’ performance.Researchers on foreign language anxiety have mainly put their focus on listening,reading,writing and other language skills,while few researchers have paid attention to foreign language anxiety in translation.It can be seen that one of the important factors affecting foreign language anxiety is translation direction.With the continuous development of translation studies,the topic of directionality has gradually attracted people’s attention.Directionality refers to the direction of translation from the second language to the first language(L1translation)or from the first language to the second language(L2 translation).In view of the fact that there is a conversion between the mother tongue and the foreign language in the process of translation,this study aims to explore the cognitive mechanism of anxiety caused by translation direction with the help of keyboard-recording and eye-tracking technology.Eye-tracking technology is an empirical research method.Researchers can track and record the participant’s eye movements when he/she is reading the text and watching the picture or video by eye trackers,and infer the processing of information in the brain according to the recorded data.Based on the research method mentioned above,this study tries to answer the following questions: 1)In the process of translation,what is the relationship between the translator’s foreign language anxiety and his/her cognitive load? 2)In L1 translation and L2 translation,which direction can arouse more anxiety? And why?and 3)Is there any difference in the cognitive mechanism of translation anxiety between L1 translation and L2 translation?In order to answer the above questions,this study is conducted by means of an eye-tracking experiment with the design of one-way independent variable(translation direction).The participants were randomly divided into two groups for L1 translation and L2 translation respectively.In the study,total task duration,pause duration,pause counts,fixation duration and fixation counts were collected by key-logging and eye-tracking technique,aiming to explore the relationship among translation direction,the cognitive load and foreign language anxiety,and the cognitive mechanism of anxiety in the process of translation.Therefore,in view of the first research question,this study finds that there is a significant positive correlation between cognitive load level and anxiety level in the process of translation.That is,the translator’s high cognitive load caused by the target language as a foreign language will lead to a high degree of foreign language anxiety.For the second research question,this study finds that 1)the translator’s cognitive load in L1 translation is significantly lower than that in L2 translation,i.e.he/she need take more cognitive efforts in L2 translation.2)The level of anxiety in L1 translation is significantly lower than that in L2 translation,which means that the translator is more likely to produce foreign language anxiety in the process of L2 translation.The above findings suggest that,as the difficulty of L2 translation is significantly higher than that of L1 translation,the translator will take more cognitive resources and increase cognitive load,and thus will have higher degree of anxiety in L2 translation.For the third question,we find that 1)for the processing of source text,the cognitive load of L1 translation is higher than that of L2 translation,but the difference is not significant.2)for the processing of target text,the cognitive load of L1 translation is significantly lower than that of L2 translation.Therefore,in both L1 and L2 translations,the cognitive load in foreign language processing is greater than that in L1 processing,and the language of target text rather than source text plays the key role in the effect of cognitive load in the following processing procedure.Therefore,combined with the first two research questions,it can be concluded that translation direction determines the language of target text(in L1 translation,the target text is the translator’s mother language;in L2 translation,the target text is his/her second/foreign language).The language of target text affects the difficulty of translation tasks,which is positively related to the translator’s cognitive load,thus affecting the translator’s anxiety level in translation.