A cognitive inquiry into similarities and differences between translation and paraphrase: Evidence from eye movement data

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 17; no. 8; p. e0272531
• Main Authors: Ma, Xingcheng, Han, Tianyi, Li, Dechao
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: San Francisco Public Library of Science 05.08.2022; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Biology and Life Sciences; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive ability; Comparative analysis; Decision making; Empirical analysis; Eye movements; Interpreters; Language; Linguistics; Methods; Paraphrase; Semantics; Similarity; Social Sciences; Translating and interpreting; Translation; Translation studies; China
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272531

Intralingual translation has long been peripheral to empirical studies of translation. Considering its many similarities with interlingual translation, also described as translation proper, we adopted eye-tracking technology to investigate the cognitive process during translation and paraphrase, an exemplification of intralingual translation. Twenty-four postgraduate students were required to perform four types of tasks (Chinese paraphrase, English-Chinese translation, English paraphrase, Chinese-English translation) for source texts (ST) of different genres. Their eye movements were recorded for analysis of the cognitive effort and attention distribution pattern. The result demonstrated that: (1) Translation elicited significantly greater cognitive efforts than paraphrase; (2) Differences between translation and paraphrase on cognitive effort were modulated by text genre and target language; (3) Translation and paraphrase did not differ strikingly in terms of attention distribution. This process-oriented study confirmed higher cognitive efforts in inter-lingual translation, which was likely due to the additional complexity of bilingual transfer. Moreover, it revealed significant modulating effects of text genre and target language.