A Study Of The Relationship Between Translator’s Agency And Translation Quality In Human-Computer Interaction

The adoption of translation technology has become a common practice in the current translation industry,and the translation process has gradually evolved into the interaction between translator and computer.The research on the topic of translation technology has achieved rich results.However,with the increasing interactions between translator and computer,there is insufficient attention paid to the human factors especially the lack of empirical research about the sense of agency of translators.Sense of agency(So A)is defined as the registration that I am the initiator of my actions.This research adopts a multi-dimensional empirical approach from the perspective of translator-computer interaction,aiming to explore the following research questions: 1)what is the relationship between the translator’s agency and translation quality in the situation of machine-assisted translation? 2)What is the change of translator’s agency and its dynamic relationship with translation quality in the long-term translation project?There are two steps consisted in this research.First,42 first-year master’s students majoring in written translation were recruited to participate in the machine-assisted translation experiment.During the experiment,1)the participants were asked to use machine translation tools to translate a Chinese and an English text separately,simulating the process of interaction between translator and computer;2)after the translation was completed,the participants were asked to recall the translation process and complete the translator’s agency scale;3)the translated texts of the 42 participants were then scored and analyzed using quantitative methods to explore the correlation and regression relationship between translator’s agency and translation quality.Second,another five master’s students majoring in written translation were observed in the longterm computer-aided translation project using Trados as the tool for six months to translate an academic paper collection titled Empirical Research on Translation Process in 2021.The specific research process included: 1)tracking and observing the beginning,middle and end of the translation process,with 1000-word translations from five participants at each stage used as the basis for evaluating translation quality;2)the participants completed the translator’s agency scale after each stage;3)the translation process of each stage was recorded to observe their behavior by using screen recording and interview,and the results were explained by applying Actor-Network Theory.Through statistical analysis of the collected data,this study found that: 1)translators in the long-term translation project had a higher sense of positive agency;2)observations showed that translator’s agency gradually increased as translators became more familiar with translation tools,materials,and requirements over the course of the project;3)due to individual differences,there was huge difference in the strength of the sense of agency among translators at the first stage.But as group collaboration strengthened,difference in the strength of translators’ agency decreased at the end of the project.4)The correlation analysis showed both positive and negative agency were correlated with translation quality.The positive agency was able to predict translation quality,while negative agency had no predictive value for translation quality.This thesis adopted the concept of actors in Actor-Network Theory to analyze the resistance and accommodation between actors,providing theoretical explanations for research results.Actors refer to entities that have the ability to act and influence other actors in the network including human and non-human.In this thesis,both translators and translation technology were regarded as actors,and their relationships and influences were constructed.1)In the long-term translation project,translators had lower sense of agency at the beginning and one-time translation task.Because the translated text produced by machine-assisted translation in the early stage reduced the creativity of the translator,they exerted less control over translation technology;2)In the long-term translation project,translators generally had a stronger sense of agency which gradually increased as the project progressed.Translators gradually became more familiar with translation tool,and their control over translation technology was enhanced.The interaction with translation technology changed from resistance to accommodation.This study further expands the research on translation technology,calling for attention to the impact of human factors on translation quality.Hopefully,this research can provide some insights for both research on translation technology and translation practice.