An Eye-tracking Study Of The Cognitive Load Exhibited In Offline Reading And Online Reading Of English-Chinese Sight Translation Between Student Interpreters

At present,the cognitive process of sight translation has been paid more and more attention.Most of the existing studies focus on the factors affecting cognitive load in online reading,but few studies are conducted to explore the cognitive process of sight translation with a focus on the two different reading stages,especially on the cognitive process of student interpreters.With the method of eye-tracking,this paper tries to answer the following four research questions:(1)What are the differences of cognitive load between offline reading and online reading in sight translation?(2)Do undergraduate and postgraduate interpreters exhibit different cognitive load?(3)Does the cognitive load exhibited in offline reading stage have an impact on the cognitive load exhibited in online reading stage in sight translation? Does the impact vary between undergraduate and postgraduate interpreters?(4)Does the cognitive load of online reading stage have an impact on the quality of sight translation(including both fluency and text quality)? Does the impact vary between undergraduate and postgraduate interpreters?This research has a 2(Reading stage: offline reading and online reading)× 2(Competence: undergraduate and postgraduate)mixed design.Reading stage is a within-participant factor;Competence is between-participant factor.We conduct an experiment among 40 student interpreters.20 are undergraduates majoring in translation while the other 20 are postgraduates majoring in translation studies.All of them are required to sight translate two passages about One Belt And One Road,and each passage is about 300 words.In the whole experiment,participants ’ eye movements are all recorded by eye-tracker.The indicators including fixation counts,average fixation duration,pupil dilation and saccade are used to reflect the cognitive load in both offline reading and online reading of sight translation.The findings are as follows: 1)The cognitive load of reading offline is significantly lower than that of online reading;2)Across the two reading stages of sight translation,the cognitive load of postgraduate interpreters is obviously lower than that of undergraduate interpreters: In the offline reading stage,there are significant differences between postgraduates and undergraduates in terms of saccade and distribution of fixation count.In the online reading stage,there are significant differences between postgraduates and undergraduates in terms of saccade and fixation count.3)For both postgraduate interpreters and undergraduate interpreters,the cognitive load exhibited in offline reading stage have an impact on the cognitive load exhibited in online reading stage of sight translation in terms of saccade and pupil dilation.4)For postgraduate interpreters,the cognitive load exhibited in online reading stage have an impact on both fluency and text quality of sight translation in terms of fixation counts;For undergraduate interpreters,the cognitive load exhibited in online reading stage have an impact only on text quality of sight translation in terms of fixation counts.This paper probes into the cognitive load of student interpreters during different reading stages of E-C(English-Chinese)sight translation,which helps further understand the cognitive process of sight translation.Moreover,the experimental data obtained through eye movement tracking in this study can provide evidence for future related research on sight translation,and the research results can offer references to sight translation training and practice.