Effect of text type on translation effort in human translation and neural machine translation post-editing processes: evidence from eye-tracking and keyboard-logging

Abstract

ABSTRACT Text type influences the translator’s decision in taking an overall translation approach and consequently selecting translation techniques. While the majority of studies to date have investigated this phenomenon as an end-product, the effect of text types on the translation process has received little attention in the area of cognitive translation processes, especially from an empirical perspective. To fill this gap, the current study employed eye-tracking and keyboard-logging approaches to investigate the effect of text type (informative text, expressive text, and operative text) on the cognitive efforts demanded in the Human Translation (HT) and Neural Machine Translation Post-Editing (PE) processes. The data was collected from 24 participants (12 professional translators and 12 undergraduate students), who were required to manually translate and post-edit three text types from Chinese into English. From the findings, it appears that text types affect the translator’s time investment, mental process, and technical input in both HT and PE processes. The findings also suggest that PE, as one mode of Human–Computer Interaction, emancipates translators from the effortful task of traditional from-scratch translation, and this effort change is also affected by the text type. The study has practical implications for both translators and translator training.