Cognitive Effort In Chinese Translation Of English Metaphors Eye-tracking And Key-logging Approaches

This thesis investigates the cognitive effort(CE)in English-Chinese translation of metaphor,employing the eye-tracking and key-logging methods.It asks three research questions: 1)How does CE differ between different strategies in EnglishChinese translation of metaphor(strategy M-M that retains the original image,strategy M1-M2 that replaces the original image with another one and strategy M-P that explains the metaphor without any metaphorical images)? 2)How does difficulty of understanding of metaphor affect the CE in the source text comprehension stage and target text production stage in metaphor translation? 3)How does translator's translation ability affect the CE in the source text comprehension stage and target text production stage in metaphor translation?This study conducted an eye-tracking and key-logging experiment among 60 translators half of whom were BA English-major students while the other 30 were MA or PhD students.They were asked to translate five texts extracted from an economic magazine.The first text was used to test the translating ability of the subjects and the other four were experimental texts with similar numbers of metaphors.The subjects' eye movements during the translation process were recorded by the eye-tracker,which could indicate the CE in the comprehension stage,while the CE in the production phrase would be reflected by the production time as shown in the keystroke logging data.The results show that strategy M1-M2 costs more CE in the reformulation stage of metaphor translation than strategies M-M and M-P.The metaphors that are more difficult to understand consume more CE only in the comprehension stage.The more capable translators spend less CE in metaphor comprehension than less capable translators but not less CE in reformulation.