Allocation Of Attentional Resources In E-C And C-E Translation

Translation involves complex cognitive processes.With the development of Translation Process Research,in particular with the use of eye-tracking and key-logging technology,translators' cognitive processes,which have been aptly referred to as "the black box",have been,to a great extent,better understood.Nevertheless,cognitive mechanism in different directions of translation,namely in L1 translation and L2 translation,has been severely under-researched and there is only a handful of research providing evidence from translation between the English and Chinese language.Allocation of attentional resources is a critical aspect of translators'cognitive capabilities.The efficiency in attentional resources allocation is a reliable indicator of the efficacy of translation process and is closely related to translators' strategic sub-competence,a critical sub-competence of translator competence.The present study is an investigation into the translators'allocation of attentional resources,as well as an investigation into directionality.We collected eye-tracking data and key-logging data of 172 translation tasks from 43 translators which yielded over-3,000-minute-long translation process data with millions of eye-tracking data points and over-50,000-word translation product data.The afore-mentioned translation process data and product data have been further aligned and integrated to generate Translation Progression Graphs,a comprehensive and accurate visualization of translators' attentional focus during the translation processes.In this study,we aimed to:1)compare and contrast the allocation of cognitive resources in two directions of translation,namely,English-Chinese translation and Chinese-English translation,2)compare and contrast the allocation of cognitive resources in three phase of translation processes,namely the Orientation Phase,Drafting Phase and Revision&Monitoring Phase,3)compare and contrast the allocation of cognitive resources in translation processes involving sources texts of varying text complexities,4)compare and contrast the allocation of cognitive resources in source text reading,target text reading and target text production.R language is used to perform Linear Mixed-Effects Regression and the results indicated that the allocation of attentional resources was influenced by directionality in many aspects.The total attentional resources allocated to L1 translation and L2 translation were found to be significantly different while only the Orientation Phase and Drafting Phase,but not the Revision&Monitoring Phase,were influenced by directionality.We also found that directionality had significant influence only on the processing of target texts,both on target texts reading and target text production,but there was no significant influence on the processing of source texts.In addition,text complexity of source texts were found to have significant influence only on the Orientation Phase and source texts processing.The present study contributed to a finer-grained understanding of cognitive processes in different directions of translation by a comprehensive investigation into the allocation of cognitive resources in both L1 and L2 translation,as well as an in-depth comparison and contrast of allocation of cognitive resources in different phases and processing types.In addition,we provided long overdue empirical evidences from the language pair of English and Chinese,whose results would help triangulate the results from other language pairs and open new avenues of study across different language pairs.As one of the pioneers in translation process research by using eye-tracking and key-logging in China,we made painstaking efforts in exploring this new field,especially in terms of research methodology like data collecting,research design and data analysis and we hope that this would be of constructive reference to future study and relevant research on other language pairs.