Pausas em uma tarefa de tradução e percepção do nível de Dificuldade da Tarefa de Tradução

Abstract

A translation task from English into Spanish (Castilian) was carried out by 5 graduate students and 1 undergraduate student highly proficient in English and Spanish. The software Inputlog was used to record all pauses and keystrokes during the translation task. Various relations were examined in attempt to draw conclusions about cognitive effort during the translation task. The first relation examined was between self-reported L1 and Verbal Fluency Scores in L1 and L2. We predicted that participants would score higher on the Verbal Fluency Test in their L1 and found this to be true for 4 out of 6 participants. We also investigated the relation between verbal fluency score and perceived level of task difficulty. We predicted that the translation task into Spanish would be perceived as less difficult for the participants who scored higher in Spanish on the verbal fluency score. This result was only the case for one out of 3 participants who scored higher in Spanish on the Verbal Fluency Test. We also looked at the relation between degree of satisfaction with the target text and perceived level of task difficulty and predicted that participants who perceived the translation task as more difficult would be less satisfied with the final product. This was the case for 4 out of 6 participants. Next, we looked at total task time and total pause time, we hypothesized that variations in pause time across participants may be due to differences in L1 however the lowest and highest pause times recorded in our data were both L1 Spanish. Finally, we looked at the number of pauses and mean time of pauses at different segment levels and found results consistent with prior research where as pauses were more frequent at lower segment levels as opposed to higher segment levels. These results suggest that pauses are in fact an indicator of cognitive load during a translation task and that translating into the participant’s L1 may help to alleviate some of this cognitive load.