An Eye-tracking And Key-logging Study On Cognitive Effort In L1 And L2 Translation

This study explores how translating into the first language(L1 translation)differs from translating into the second language(L2 translation)in terms of cognitive effort.This study focuses on Chinese-English language pair.Based on Reiss’s text typology,advertisement,news and poem are selected as the source text type.The objective of the study is to explore whether L2 translation is more cognitively demanding than L1 translation,and whether the result can be changed by the type of source text.Eye-tracking and key-logging are employed as research methods in this thesis.The following indicators of cognitive effort are analyzed:Seconds per Word(SW),Total User Activity per Word(TUAW),Source Fixation Count per Word(SFCW),Target Fixation Count per Word(TFCW),Source Fixation Duration per Word(SFDW),Target Fixation Duration per Word(TFDW),Pause Count per Word(PCW)and Pause Duration per Word(PDW).The results show significant differences between L1 and L2 translations for novice translators,and there is no significant difference with regard to text type.To be more specific,results reveal that cognitive effort required in L2 translation is higher than L1 translation,and it is not influenced by source text type.It is also observed that student translators invest more cognitive efforts in L1 translation task than in L2 task in the processing of source texts,while they exert more efforts in L2 translation task than in L1 task in the processing of target texts.