Web Search Behavior Of Translators:Based On Chinese-to-English Scientific Translation

Translation process research can reveal translators' thinking activities,which is very important for translation teaching and development.At its initial stage,think-aloud protocol(TAP),used as a study method,has been controversial for its subjectivity.With the development of tools such as keystroke logging and eye-tracking,more scholars begin to conduct studies in this area.Scholars in the west have been studying it for a long time.PACTE group proposed a translation competence model containing all competences required in translation process,and many studies were then conducted.Compared with the west,translation studies at home are still at its beginning,and the empirical studies are relatively deficient.This study takes PACTE translation competence model as its theoretical framework and raises two research problems:(1)what are the web search behavior features of novice and experienced translators in the process of Chinese-to-English scientific text translation?(2)What are the differences and similarities of their web search behavior?This study aims at providing teachers with some teaching reference and enriching empirical translation process research at home.This study chose seven MTI students and three experienced translators as participants and two scientific texts as materials.Inputlog,FSCapture,and retrospective interviews were adopted as research tools.Research results indicated that there is no significant difference between novice and experienced translators in their preference of search engines,just a slight preference of Google for experienced translators;compared with novice,experienced translators have a strong sense of translation problem realization,more ways to use web sources;both of them can use web to assist their translation and take good use of machine translation.In the era of information,the ability of information search has much more importance.Based on the above findings,teachers and students should emphasize web search,information screening,and verification to further improve their translation.