Arnt Lykke Jakobsen

Of Mouths and Men: Non-Native Listeners' Identification and Evaluation of Varieties of English.

Advanced Danish students of English as a foreign language tried to identify the national origin of young men from Ireland, Scotland, England and the USA from their speech and rated the speech for attractiveness. Two male speakers from each country were heard reading lists of words aloud (Experiment 1) and making utterances that could be used to say hello to someone, thank them,swear at them, or say good-bye (Experiment 2). In both studies, listeners succeeded about three-fourths of the time in recognizing a speakers country of origin. Listeners were more accurate in identifying speakers from England and from the USA, but identi ?ability also varied between speakers from the same country. Listeners rated speech produced by Englishmen as most attractive and the speech of Americans as least so. Rated attractiveness also varied with the speaker and the kind of utterance produced.

Towards statistical modelling of translators’ activity data

The paper discusses recent advances in human translation process research and presents a methodology for gathering and analysing translators’ activity data. We compare three translations of an English text into Danish. A coherent representation of the User Activity Data and a query formalism is suggested for retrieving source-target language alignment units and for tracing and interpreting the process data for these units. We look at a number of correction patterns and a fixation pause in more detail. With a better and more formalised way of understanding the underlying human processes, new technologies and novel ways of using existing technology could emerge that tighten the integration of speech recognition and automated translation aids into the translation workflow.

Effects of time pressure and text complexity on translators' fixations

We tracked the eye movements of 18 students as they translated three short texts with different complexity levels under three different time constraints. Participants with touch typing skills were found to attend more to on-screen text than participants without touch typing skills. Time pressure was found to mainly affect fixations on the source text, and text complexity was found to only affect the number of fixations on the source text. Overall, it was found that average fixation duration was longer in the target text area than in the source text area.

Translation as textual (re)production

Abstract Translation has often been regarded as a predominantly reproductive skill. Following the emphasis on communicative aspects of translation, productive aspects have recently come more into focus ‐ to such an extent that translation is sometimes barely distinguishable from original text production. This shift has been welcomed by Reiss, who has always insisted on the need for a target text to be more than a passive reflection of a source text. Originally hypothesising that the source text determines what translation method must be used, Reiss in her later publications assumes no such correlation between source text type and translation method. However, she strongly opposes attempts to ‘dethrone’ the source text, claiming that it remains the yardstick for all measuring in translation. Against this background, the article argues that the extreme positions proclaiming either source or target text hegemony are both untenable. Target text production can neither be completely controlled by a source text, ...

Are gaze shifts a key to a translator’s text segmentation?

Abstract Keystroke logging has demonstrated that a translator’s text production can be broken down into units separated by pause boundaries (Dragsted 2004, 2005, 2010). Reading research has not identified analogous boundaries, as the only interruptions in a reader’s visual attention to a text are often only blinks. However, in an experimental setup with tracking of a translator’s gaze movements across a screen showing the source text and (emerging) target text, gaze data show the translator’s shifts of visual attention between the two texts. Can such shifts be seen as an index of content processing units? And do such shifts give us more accurate information about segmentation or more information than keystroke intervals? Using a rather poorly calibrated recording of just one translator’s translation of a single sentence (within a longer task) for illustration, the paper seeks to tentatively explore the feasibility of identifying segments, understood as processing units, on the basis of gaze shifts, and to inquire into what motivates gaze shifts. It also seeks to illustrate how much our interpretation of gaze representations, not least suboptimal representations, depend on a theory of reading.