Processing Garden-Path Sentences in Sight Translation: An Experimental Study

Abstract

Garden-path refers to a type of temporary syntactic ambiguity in which the phrase structure rules allow two possible attachments of a constituent (Fromkin, Rodman & Hymas, 2011, p. 385). This study aims to investigate whether sight translators who are trained on this type of translation perform better in overcoming garden-path effect than other translators who are not trained on sight translation. During the translation process of such sentences, the sight transla-tor is expected to parse the syntactic order of the source text correctly to grasp the meaning, and reformulate the message in the target language applying the necessary transpositions in the word order. An experiment was designed to test the performance differences in sight trans-lation of garden-path sentences. Experimental and control groups were given five garden-path sentences within various contexts and were asked to record their voices. The results showed that trained sight translators tend to receive garden-path sentences as a whole and concentrate on the message of the sentence, making use of certain skills and techniques in reading. In this sense, trained sight translators are more successful in parsing complex sentences with garden-path effect than ordinary readers.