Moritz Schaeffer

Measuring the Cognitive Effort of Literal Translation Processes

It has been claimed that human translators rely on some sort of literal translation equivalences to produce translations and to check their validity. More effort would be required if translations are less literal. However, to our knowledge, there is no established metric to measure and quantify this claim. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by introducing a metric for measuring literality of translations and assesses the effort that is observed when translators produce translations which deviate from the introduced literality definition.

Outline for a Relevance Theoretical Model of Machine Translation Post-editing

Translation process research (TPR) has advanced in the recent years to a state which allows us to study “in great detail what source and target text units are being processed, at a given point in time, to investigate what steps are involved in this process, what segments are read and aligned and how this whole process is monitored” (Alves 2015, p. 32). We have sophisticated statistical methods and with the powerful tools to produce a better and more detailed understanding of the underlying cognitive processes that are involved in translation. Following Jakobsen (2011), who suspects that we may soon be in a situation which allows us to develop a computational model of human translation, Alves (2015) calls for a “clearer affiliation between TPR studies and a particular cognitive sciences paradigm” (p. 23).