Directionality Study Of English-Chinese Sight Translation By Way Of Eye Tracking Analysis

The study on translation directionality has enjoyed a harvest from perspectives of linguistics,cognitive science and culturology,to name a few.Reading is an essential step in sight translation and there is a close relationship between the fluency of sight translation delivery and the reading efficiency.This thesis is an empirical study that aimed to investigate regression parameters and other eye movement indices in two-way English and Chinese sight translation.Through eye tracking subjects' beforehand reading and sight translation performances in two-way English and Chinese sight translation,the following three hypotheses are ready to be corroborated: 1)Based on the exploration of and the comparison between certain eye movement indices,the reading pattern in the preparation before sight translation is strikingly similar to that under ordinary circumstances.2)There are more or longer regressive eye movements during sight translation compared with those in beforehand reading due to syntactic discrepancies and directionality does exert an impact on regression measures.3)Regressions during sight translating phase correlate with sight translation performance,comparatively speaking,advanced student interpreters make more rational use of sight translation strategies and skills than novice student interpreters.Nineteen subjects were selected in the study.All of the nineteen subjects were postgraduate English major students in the research field of interpreting studies at Shanghai International Studies University.Their sight translation performances were eyetracked,recorded and transcribed,analysis was done by ANOVA.The analysis showed that reading before two-way sight translation was similar to common bilingual reading but reading during sight translation requires more cognitive effort.Due to the requirement of simultaneity of comprehension and production,regressions and other eye movements were similar in both Language A and Language B translation tasks to some extent.But regressions directly correlate with sight translation performance.Through the examination of the correlation between regressions and sight translation performance,the importance of reading efficiency and syntactic linearity was highlighted,which sheds some light on sight translation teaching.