Assessing indicators of cognitive effort in professional translators: A study on language dominance and directionality

Recently in translation studies, important advances have been made with respect to directionality (i.e., whether translation is done into one's native or non-native language). What was once considered the "elephant in the room," directionality now has a growing number of empirical studies that analyze factors which contribute differentially to translation. In this chapter, we review variables that have been previously identified as related to a higher or a lower degree of cognitive activity in direct and inverse translation (DT and IT, respectively). Against this backdrop, we present a study conducted among professional translators of English and Spanish who completed two translation tasks: one in which they translated a text from English into Spanish and another in which they translated another text from Spanish into English. We use behavioral and eye-tracking measures to analyze time, mouse events, keypresses, saccade index, and gaze index data. We also explore the effects of age and sex/gender. The results suggest that in terms of length, although translators spent longer in IT compared to DT, this difference was not statistically significant. However, there was a correlation between translation direction and fixation index such that participants showed a higher gaze event duration in IT. Age was correlated to fixation index (lower fixation index among older translators) and sex/gender was also related to fixation index (females presented lower values in IT in comparison to DT). Results also suggested a higher gaze point index in IT and a higher keypress index for English-dominant translators, and a higher gaze point index in DT for Spanish-dominant translators. Overall, our study suggests that although some of the variability in the results is likely due to individual differences, the observed patterns help us better understand differences between DT and IT.