An Empirical Investigation Of Cognitive Effort Required To Machine Translation Post-editing Compared To Human Translation

The present study is to investigate from a cognitive perspective the applicability of post-editing of machine translation for college English learners to conduct Chinese-English translation,compared with traditional human translation.Method involved in this research is eye-tracking.Three research questions are raised to explore: a)differences of temporal and cognitive effort required to post-editing and human translation;b)impacts of text type and competence of translator on the cognitive effort for post-editing;c)distinctions of the allocation of cognitive effort to source text and target text between human translation and post-editing.This research has a 2(Task: post-editing and human translation)×3(Text: economic,political and literary)×2(Competence: undergraduate and postgraduate)mixed design.Task and text type are within-subject factors;competence of translator is between-subject factor.Participants for this research consist of 15 undergraduates and 15 postgraduates.Each participant is asked to translate six short texts,three to translate from scratch and three to post-edit.Translation materials are presented with Translog II.Real-time eye movement data is collected by eye-tracker.Pupil dilation,fixation count and fixation duration are collected as proxies of cognitive effort.Processing speed is considered as an indicator of temporal effort.Results show that(1)post-editing is processed significantly faster than human translation(p < 0.01);(2)fixation counts for post-editing are significantly fewer than those for human translation,so is the average fixation duration;pupil dilation for post-editing is significantly smaller than that for human translation;all these indicate that cognitive effort required to post-editing is less,compared with human translation(p < 0.01);(3)the main effect of text type is significant(p < 0.01),which indicates that cognitive effort for post-editing varies with text types;(4)the main effect of competence proves marginally significant(p = 0.051);postgraduates require less cognitive effort for post-editing than undergraduates;(5)translators look more into source text area in human translation than in post-editing(p < 0.01);yet no significant difference is found in terms of fixation counts in target text area;besides,fixation duration on source text and target text are both significantly longer in translation process than in post-editing process(p < 0.01).Significant differences proven in fixation counts and fixation duration together indicate that,compared with post-editing,translators consume more cognitive effort for both source text comprehension and target text production when translating from scratch;(6)for both post-editing and human translation task,there are more fixation counts and longer fixation duration in the target text area than in the source text area.Based on the results indicated above,post-editing could save temporal effort and increase productivity.What's more,post-editing saves cognitive effort in both source text comprehension and target text production.Thus,post-editing should be a viable alternative for college English learner to translate from Chinese to English.