Ten Years of Translog PDF

CONTENTS
Foreword by Finn Junge-Jensen .................................................................. xi

Introduction ................................................................................................... 1
Arnt Lykke Jakobsen

Arnt Lykke Jakobsen: portrait of an innovator1 ............................................ 9
Inger Mees
Ten years of Translog .................................................................................. 37
Lasse Schou, Barbara Dragsted & Michael Carl
Part I: Methodological issues

What can translation research learn from Darwin? ..................................... 51
Andrew Chesterman
Eye to IS: on qualitative research in interpreting studies ........................... 67
Franz Pöchhacker
The way they were: subject profiling in translation process research ........ 87
Ricardo Muñoz Martín
Exploring retrospection as a research method for studying the
translation process and the interpreting process ....................................... 109
Birgitta Englund Dimitrova & Elisabet Tiselius
Using process studies in translator training: self-discovery through
lousy experiments ...................................................................................... 135
Anthony Pym
Part II: Computer assistance in process research

Adding value to data in translation process research:
the TransComp Asset Management System ............................................. 159
Susanne Göpferich
Markers of translator gender: do they really matter? ................................ 183
Miriam Shlesinger, Moshe Koppel, Noam Ordan & Brenda Malkiel
1
See pp. 33-36 for a select list of Arnt Lykke Jakobsen’s publications.
x Contents
Uncovering the ‘lost’ structure of translations with parallel treebanks .... 199
Matthias Kromann, Iørn Korzen & Henrik Høeg Müller
Triangulating product and process data: quantifying alignment units
with keystroke data.................................................................................... 225
Michael Carl
Part III: Eye-tracking

Eye tracking in translation-process research: methodological
challenges and solutions ............................................................................ 251
Sharon O’Brien
A new window on translators’ cognitive activity: methodological
issues in the combined use of eye tracking, key logging and
retrospective protocols .............................................................................. 267
Fabio Alves, Adriana Pagano & Igor da Silva
Experts exposed......................................................................................... 293
Barbara Dragsted, Inge Gorm Hansen & Henrik Selsøe Sørensen
Effects of L1 syntax on L2 translation ..................................................... 319
Kristian T.H. Jensen, Annette C. Sjørup & Laura Winther Balling
Part IV: Precision, strategies and quality assessment

Translation preferences in legal translation: lawyers and professional
translators compared ................................................................................. 339
Dorrit Faber & Mette Hjort-Pedersen
The necessary degree of precision revisited ............................................. 359
Paul Kußmaul
Looking for a working definition of ‘translation strategies’ ..................... 375
Riitta Jääskeläinen
Some thoughts about the evaluation of translation products in
translation process research ....................................................................... 389
Gyde Hansen
Notes on contributors ................................................................................ 403
FOREWORD
CBS is unique among the thousands of business schools around the world.
During the last two decades, it has developed a broad range of disciplines
within the social sciences and the humanities, emphasising cross-
disciplinary collaboration in order to meet the challenges from a fast
changing and complex global knowledge society. Language, culture and
communication are now recognised as core areas of its profile.
Within translation and translation technology, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen
has been an invaluable academic entrepreneur, who has founded a research
centre, implemented EU projects and established international net-
works. He has also been a key figure in one of the six world-class research
environments started up at CBS in 2008. In addition, he has been actively
involved in setting research agendas, developing strategies and facilitating
collaboration across research areas both in the Academic Council and in
countless everyday CBS activities.
Arnt has shown himself to have an open mind, boundless curiosity
and proved in all ways a highly valued colleague. It has been a privilege to
work with him.
Finn Junge-Jensen
President of CBS, 1987–2009
INTRODUCTION
On 27 December, 2009, Arnt Lykke Jakobson will celebrate his 65th

birthday. Usually this age is associated with retirement but not so in Arnt‟s
case. His pioneering spirit, innovative force and visionary ideas continue to
give fresh impetus to translation and interpreting process research.
With the contributions collected in this liber amicorum, its authors
and editors wish to honour Arnt Lykke Jakobsen as a researcher, as a
teacher and as a friend, and to thank him for the inspiration he has given us.
In recognition of his achievements, the two opening contributions
deal with Arnt‟s scholarly pursuits. The first, by Inger M. Mees, attempts
to show just how multi-faceted his all-round talent is by emphasising
highlights from his career and providing an overview of his most important
publications. The second, by Lasse Schou, Barbara Dragsted and
Michael Carl, gives an historical account of the development of Translog,
the key-logging software conceived by Arnt, which is now a translation
process research tool used worldwide.
The remainder of Copenhagen Studies in Language 38 is divided
into four sections, which reflect Professor Jakobsen‟s broad range of
interest in translation and interpreting studies.
Part I: Methodological issues
The first section comprises five contributions on methodological issues in

empirical studies, and the articles move from the general to the more
specific.
The section begins with Andrew Chesterman‟s explanation of why he

believes “Charles Darwin can be a model for any empirical researcher”.
Inspired by Darwin‟s Origin of Species, which originally appeared in 1859,
Chesterman describes Darwin‟s way of thinking and writing, his sense of
curiosity, his desire to question and test assumptions, his ability to unite a
variety of facts under a single uniting principle, and his emphasis on
considering counter-evidence. Darwin‟s rhetorical strategy is that of a
2 Inger M. Mees, Fabio Alves & Susanne Göpferich
dialogue or debate. The paper is interspersed with parallels drawn between

Darwin‟s empirical methods and those of translation research.
Franz Pöchhacker gives a broad perspective of methodologies in the field

of interpreting studies (IS) from various vantage points. After providing a
historiographical survey of the research methods employed in IS,
Pöchhacker aims at substantiating a trend he has observed towards an
increasing number of studies adopting qualitative approaches. He does this
by examining the publications included in the Interpreting Studies Reader
(Pöchhacker & Shlesinger 2002), containing material from 1956 to 2002;
the Benjamins Translation library (1990s to the present); and the 100
papers published in the journal Interpreting since its foundation in 1996.
Ricardo Muñoz Martín argues that research into translation processes

needs more methodological rigour. In his paper, which deals with subject
profiling, Muñoz points out that not enough attention has been paid to
variations in subjects‟ mental abilities and language skills. Unless these are
comparable, it is uncertain whether findings are the result of the variables
that are measured or whether they can be attributed to inter-individual
variation. It is proposed that subjects can be classified by means of the
WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale) and TOEFL (Test of English as a
Foreign Language) subtests. The article discusses the results of an
experiment in which 17 subjects who translated four texts using Translog
were profiled on the basis of their performance in the above-mentioned
tests.
Another methodological paper is that authored by Birgitta Englund

Dimitrova and Elisabet Tiselius. They discuss retrospection, cued by the
source text/source speech, as a means of accessing the cognitive processing
of problems and strategies in both translation and simultaneous
interpreting. The protocols of six subjects (three in each mode) are
subjected to close scrutiny, the main objective being to find a suitable way
of coding and analysing the data obtained by this method.
Anthony Pym shows how translation process research can benefit the
training of translators. Nineteen students from different language programs
Introduction 3
(7 Chinese, 5 Korean, 1 Japanese, 6 French) participated in three

experiments conducted in the classroom. Pym investigated whether
machine translation slows down the translation process, whether different
translators have different styles and whether time pressure leads to a loss in
translation quality. He concludes that experimental approaches are
definitely able to allow students to discover more about their own translator
behaviour.
Part II: Computer assistance in process research
The second section brings together various contributions dealing with ways
in which computers can assist translation process researchers in their
endeavours.
Susanne Göpferich‟s article shows how electronic systems can be used to

make the large amounts of data typically collected in process studies
available on the Internet. In many cases, the data gathered in such studies
are never published, which makes it difficult to reproduce and verify the
results, or indeed to re-use the data. Göpferich argues in favour of
employing Asset Management Systems for “storing, archiving, annotating,
analysing and displaying digital resources of any type”, exemplifying this
by describing the one developed for her own longitudinal study
TransComp. Amongst many other features, this system enables one to link
transcripts to the corresponding sections in the video files.
Miriam Shlesinger, Moshe Koppel, Noam Ordan and Brenda Malkiel

are interested in the interface between computational linguistics and
translation studies. They draw attention to the fact that “translation scholars
routinely use methodologies, terminology, and findings from fields as
disparate as psychology, linguistics, comparative literature, sociology and
cultural studies”, but that “they are less prone to seek common ground with
the „hard sciences‟”. Their paper is an attempt to remedy this lacuna.
Machine learning has earlier been shown to be successful in determining
author gender, but Shlesinger and her co-authors have now taken this one
step further. They investigate whether computers are also able to classify
texts by translator gender based on features in the translation. Their corpus
consisted of 273 samples of literary prose translated into English from 12

different languages. Interestingly, the results showed that the computer
could be trained to identify a number of male vs. female characteristics;
however, as yet, the gender of the translator cannot accurately be predicted.
Matthias Buch-Kromann, Iørn Korzen and Henrik Høeg Müller are

engaged in investigating how computers can be trained to contribute to our
understanding of human translation processes. In their paper they outline
the design principles behind the Copenhagen Dependency Treebanks, a set
of parallel treebanks for a number of languages with a unified annotation of
morphology, syntax, discourse and translational equivalence. These
treebanks can be used to express structural relationships between source
and target texts and thus provide answers to a number of qualitative and
quantitative research questions about translations, such as how often
particular structures occur in different languages, how they are mapped to
other languages, and what the systematic differences between languages
are. To illustrate the type of research they have in mind, they put forward
some hypotheses about morphology and discourse and describe how these
can be explored by means of treebanks.
Michael Carl proposes a strategy and a set of tools for cross-validating and
triangulating Translog product and process data. Translation process
scholars are familiar with translation units (cognitive entities in the process
data), but Carl now introduces the notion of an alignment unit (AU), which
refers to translation equivalences in the source and target texts in the
product data. Once the source and target texts have been fragmented into
AUs, all the keystroke data obtained from Translog can be allocated to
them.
Part III: Eye-tracking
The third section comprises four papers dealing with eye-tracking.
Sharon O’Brien addresses methodological matters in translation process

research, specifically those related to eye-tracking studies. The challenges
posed are divided into five categories (research environment, research
Introduction 5
participants, ethics, data explosion and validity), some of which have been
further subdivided. Each of the issues is discussed followed by possible
solutions to the problems.
Fabio Alves, Adriana Pagano and Igor da Silva conducted a study

combining eye-tracking with key logging and retrospective protocols. Ten
professional translators were asked to carry out a direct and an inverse
translation. This was followed by two types of retrospection (verbalisation
elicited by a replay of their own task and by means of questions) during
which the eye-tracker was switched on. Firstly, the study tests whether
average fixation length is affected by the use of different filters. Secondly,
it measures the effect of directionality on fixation length, and on the
amount of time spent on the different phases of translation. Finally, the
retrospective protocols are analysed as a means of gaining insight into the
metacognitive activity of professional translators.
Barbara Dragsted, Inge Gorm Hansen and Henrik Selsøe Sørensen

have carried out an explorative study of the processes and products of three
expert translators who were to a greater or lesser extent familiar with
speech recognition (SR) technology. The participants were given five tasks:
a reading task, a reading-for-the-purpose-of-translation task, a sight
translation task, a sight translation task with the use of SR and a written
translation task. Time consumption and translation behaviour are then
compared. In addition to investigating a number of process variables, the
authors have also undertaken a preliminary analysis of the translations
produced in the written and SR conditions in order to detect potential
differences in the quality of the spoken and written output.
Kristian TH Jensen, Annette Sjørup and Laura Winther Balling

conducted an eye-tracking experiment with the purpose of establishing
whether segments requiring a change in the word order in the translation
had an effect on the participants‟ eye behaviour. Two Danish texts (the
translators‟ L1) were translated into English (their L2). They contained
clauses for which the order of subject and verb could be transferred directly
and clauses where the order had to be reversed. It turned out that the
participants gazed significantly longer at segments for which the word
order had to be reversed even though there was no significant word order
effect on pupil dilation. The study suggests possible interpretations for this
difference.
Part IV: Precision, strategies and quality assessment
Our last section comprises four articles on precision in translation, the

different definitions of the concept of “strategy”, and quality assessment of
target texts.
Dorrit Faber and Mette Hjort-Pedersen adopt an interesting approach to

exploring the issue of fidelity to the source text vs. catering for the needs of
target-text readers in legal translation. They analyse eight translations of an
English pre-marital contract produced by four lawyers and four
professional translators, investigating to what extent explicitations and
implicitations are handled differently by the two groups. The results show
that the two groups do indeed vary in certain respects. This is attributed to
differences (a) in drafting style conventions, (b) in the manner in which
legal concepts are handled and (c) in the degree of narrowing of legal
conceptual content.
Paul Kußmaul elaborates on “the principle of the necessary degree of

precision” and illustrates this using examples from the translation of social
surveys. Translators will often avoid taking risks for the sake of caution,
but in this paper Kußmaul argues that being precise often involves taking
chances, and that the crucial skill a translator needs to acquire is how to
manage uncertainty (namely, risk reduction rather than risk avoidance). It is
shown that, if dealt with properly, the concepts of explicitation and
equivalence can be seen as forms of risk management. In order to arrive at
the optimal degree of precision, translators should bear in mind the
function of the segment to be translated, and make use of the notions of
prototypicality and scenes.
Riitta Jääskeläinen discusses the difficult concept of “translation

strategy”, which has multiple definitions both in translation and other fields
such as second language acquisition and cognitive psychology. She
Introduction 7
illustrates how various scholars have attempted to come to grips with the
notion by means of various categorisations (textual and procedural; local
and global; product- and process-oriented). The paper concludes with a
map showing how the different strategy notions might be related to each
other.
The final paper in this volume, authored by Gyde Hansen, serves as a

reminder to translation process researchers that, although process research
is interesting in its own right, it is also important to consider the quality of
the results of these processes, namely the evaluation of the product. The
criteria adopted naturally depend on the purpose for which the evaluation is
carried out, whether this is scientific translation criticism; practice (in
companies); translation didactics; or translation process research. The
article discusses issues such as the choice of evaluators, the value of pre-
defined criteria and procedures, and the classification and weighting of
errors.
The editors wish to thank Finn Junge-Jensen, former President of the

Copenhagen Business School, and Alex Klinge, Head of the Department of
International Language Studies and Computational Linguistics, for
providing the funding for this work.
Copenhagen, Belo Horizonte and Graz, October 2009 The Editors

Arnt Lykke Jakobsen: portrait of an innovator
Inger M. Mees
Early years at the university
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

(Ezra Pound)
When, in 1985, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen moved from his post at Copenhagen
University to accept an associate professorship at the Copenhagen Business
School (CBS), his father jumped for joy. Now the grocer‟s son was back
where he belonged. He‟d had the good sense to return to a business
environment with every promise of a secure and successful future career.
And today, almost twenty-five years on, were he still alive, Jakobsen père
would have every reason to say “I told you so”. At the time, our protagonist
might have had his doubts about his decision. Coming as he did from a
traditional arts faculty with an emphasis on core university subjects such as
literature, history and philosophy, and having as his main interest English
literature, the move to the Business School was a major step, and he must
have felt uncertain as to what the future held in store. His research had so
far largely focussed on literary theory and analysis, notably the works of
Malcolm Lowry (Jakobsen 1980, 1981) and D. H. Lawrence (Einersen and
Jakobsen 1984). In Jakobsen (1985a) he had attempted to explain why
Lawrence still appeals so much to modern readers – even though the
reasons for reading him are so different from the situation in the thirties.
Jakobsen (1985b) is a meticulous and captivating account of how
Lawrence‟s works were received and interpreted in Denmark in the half-
century spanning 1932 to 1982. Incidentally, we may also note Jakobsen
(2007), where Arnt returns to his early literary interests. But although the
main focus was on literature, one can also trace an early fascination with
text linguistics, pragmatics and semantics, all of which formed a basis for
10 Inger M. Mees
his literary analyses, and which would now prove invaluable to him in his
new role of making the teaching of translation at CBS more theoretically
informed. His faculty for critical thinking and the intellectual curiosity that
drove his research were clearly present right from the outset of his career.
Arnt Lykke Jakobsen was born on 27 December 1944, and grew up
in the little town of Skjern in western Jutland – far from the bustle of the
metropolis, and where at the time a large percentage of the population had
only limited education with very little chance of acquiring more. His all-
round talents were evident from an early age, both to his parents and his
schoolteachers. It was therefore no surprise that he became, as his mother
respectfully used to put it, “the first academic in the family”. After
completing secondary school in Tarm, a nearby town, at the age of 18 he
moved to the capital to read English at Copenhagen University, obtaining
his MA in 1972. He was appointed Assistant Professor at the University in
the same year, and Associate Professor in 1978. In 1973/74 he spent a year
in the USA as Visiting Lecturer at Tufts University, Medford/
Massachusetts.
Coming from a somewhat remote area had given him an insatiable
curiosity about the wider world and one of the ways he satisfied this was
through reading the classics of world literature. Above all, he devoured
works in English by famous authors – Laurence Sterne, Joseph Fielding,
George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Graham Greene,
John Fowles, Salman Rushdie, to name just a few. Even today, his desire to
obtain information about anything and everything remains undiminished. I
have often seen him grab a dictionary, or start googling, right in the middle
of a conversation if a topic crops up where he feels he needs to boost his
knowledge. It could be anything – translating an English word into
German, the rendering in English of a Danish idiomatic expression, the
geographical location of a town or country (Google Earth is a favourite!), a
composer‟s date of birth, the Latin name of a flower or bird, the workings
of software programs, or even the rules of cricket – I could go on. His
genuine need to soak up all kinds of information is doubtless the
explanation for his encyclopaedic knowledge covering a wide range of
topics. And it is also why he is such a fascinating conversationalist.
Arnt Lykke Jakobsen: portrait of an innovator 11
Research interests: literature, text analysis and semantics
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole

culture.
(Anthony Burgess)
So Arnt Lykke Jakobsen‟s early years as a researcher were devoted to

literature, his approach always being guided by a broad understanding of
the concept of meaning. No fuzzy interpretations are to be found in his
analyses; he always takes due account of the speaker, the receiver and the
situation. Meaning is embedded in the text, the co-text and the context, and
the interpretation of an utterance therefore goes far beyond what can be
looked up in a dictionary. People‟s backgrounds, cultures and experiences,
the manner in which something is spoken, accompanying facial expressions
and gestures, all contribute to the way we perceive and understand matters.
This approach is evident if one watches Arnt trying to read and
interpret a text. He takes off his glasses, bends down over the book, picks
up a pen, scrutinises the text and underlines all the relevant portions. A
slight frown is visible as he raises his eyebrows and accesses the
knowledge stored in his brain in order to add this to the information he is
gleaning from the text. One can virtually see him constructing meaning as
he goes along. He doesn‟t gladly tolerate incompetence: incorrect grammar
and orthography, infelicitous phrasing, illogical sequencing, the use of
clichés, stereotypes and unsuccessful imagery are all likely to provoke
severe criticism, or at least obvious displeasure. In contrast, well-written
work gives him intense pleasure: beauty and quality of language contribute
greatly to the enjoyment he obtains from reading and listening. He is a
gifted translator and writer himself, having an unsurpassed ability for
phrasing matters elegantly, precisely and concisely. He has at his disposal a
vast vocabulary in both Danish and English – with the possible exception
of the little word “no”, which he finds hard to articulate if asked for help or
advice. This may account for the amazing number of undertakings in which
he is involved.
Arnt‟s spoken English is also excellent. His pronunciation is almost
flawless, and in Britain people rarely take him for anything other than a
native speaker. He is also a superb mimic, and seems able to imitate many
varieties of Danish and English, all the more convincingly because he so
12 Inger M. Mees
effortlessly reproduces speakers‟ voice qualities. His co-authorship of a

piece on Danish students‟ identification and evaluation of different accents
of English (Jarvella et al. 2001) bears testimony to his liking for dialects.
Another of his talents is that he is a brilliant annotator. To get a taste
of this, read Jakobsen‟s (1980) annotation of Malcolm Lowry‟s Under the
Volcano (1947), which contains a host of comments and notes. In fact, in
his early days, Arnt‟s outstanding analytical powers were mainly revealed
in the form of writings based on his close reading of the works of literary
critics – “Critique of Wayne C. Booth‟s Rhetoric of Irony” (Jakobsen 1977)
being a good example. His interest in semantics is reflected in another pre-
CBS publication on hypostasis forms (Jakobsen 1982), an article which
measured up to his own high standards (Arnt is invariably his own sternest
critic).
Although Arnt Lykke Jakobsen‟s early work did not deal with
translation per se, his curiosity about what constitutes textual meaning
clearly paved the way for his new field of research. Bearing this in mind, it
is not so surprising that he managed to adapt so easily to the study of
translation at CBS.
The move to CBS: from literature to translation
As mentioned above, 1985 saw him make the move from Copenhagen
University to the Department of English at CBS. His new CBS colleagues
had a great deal of experience in teaching practical translation skills, but
the subject was greatly in need of a person who could provide a theoretical
foundation.
Before Arnt began to concentrate on domain-specific translation,
there was a transitional period in which his original interest in literature
was still clearly apparent, but in which one could already see in which
direction he was heading. In his last year at the university he had
contributed numerous brief entries on British and American literature to the
supplementary volumes of a Danish encyclopaedia, Gyldendals Leksikon.
Although he was rapidly adjusting to his new situation, for a time Arnt
remained much preoccupied with literary matters; he was still working on
D. H. Lawrence‟s reception in Denmark, and was also invited to talk on the
main Danish radio channel on various authors (for example, on Lawrence
and his wife Frieda von Richthofen, and on John Fowles). Arnt still retains
his love of literature, one manifestation of this being his personal library
containing many thousands of books (including many first editions) for
which he is ever trying to find new storage space. It is a joy to watch him
picking up a book, gently removing the dust jacket, fingering the covers,
studying the title page, and then slowly turning the pages.
In the year of his CBS appointment, he published a paper in Danish
(Jakobsen 1985c) on translation and localisation (in its original broad sense
of adapting a text to a local culture, rather than the current more specialised
meaning of translating software packages, websites and other products that
need to be adapted for international markets). In this piece, his literary
roots are still clearly to be seen. The examples are from older Danish and
English literary works, including a translation into Danish of Alexander
Pope‟s Rape of the Lock, where, among other things, the translator has
localised the Thames as a Danish equivalent, Øresund („the Sound‟). In an
attempt to define the difference between translation and localisation, he
explains (1985c: 12) that translation involves equivalence between two
semantic structures while localisation consists in equivalence between two
semiotic structures, namely the complete meaning structures of the two
linguistic communities involved.
Jakobsen (1988) provides a detailed overview of the earliest
translations from English into Danish; these appeared in the middle of the
seventeenth century – the very first translated writings having come via
Latin. Translations of English literature into other modern European
languages emerged at the beginning of the seventeenth century but in
Denmark things moved somewhat more slowly. At that time, English was
little known, and the availability of German translations had made
translations from English into Danish seem superfluous (pp. 367ff.). The
vast amount of work involved in tracing these early specimens, and the
accurate biographical information provided on the translators, are typical of
Arnt‟s approach to research. Like his previously mentioned study of
Lawrence (1985b), this research is characterised by the same patient,
conscientious and meticulous search for facts, precise details and evidence
of extensive reading. Arnt never goes for the easy way out. Every line he
produces is considered and reconsidered, written and rewritten, and then
checked and double-checked.
14 Inger M. Mees
Computers and corpora
Many critics, no defenders,

translators have but two regrets:
when we hit, no one remembers,
when we miss, no one forgets.
(Anonymous)
In the mid and late 1980s Arnt became fascinated by the new possibilities
available through the introduction of word processors. I remember his talk
to his colleagues at CBS in the mid-80s when I had helped him carry up an
incredibly heavy, monstrously large word processor from his car parked in
the basement area to a room on the third floor where he was demonstrating
this new toy. This was at a time when floppy disks really were floppy and
the whole apparatus was slow and clumsy – the computer groaned while
going about its tasks. The rest of us had just about come round to accepting
the electric typewriter. Some of us had even grown adept at switching the
golf balls to obtain different fonts, but very few of us were ready for these
new electronic wonders. Eventually we all did come to terms with them of
course, and even managed to give up hitting the return key every time we
reached the end of a line. But Arnt was way ahead of his colleagues. I
remember his eyes shining and the fervour with which he elaborated on all
the features and advantages of word processing. His enthusiasm made a
deep impression on us all.
Not surprisingly, the computer age (this was before we started
calling it the “information age”) did indeed present new avenues for
linguistic research, and Arnt quickly saw the potential it offered for storing
and processing large quantities of texts which would then enable the study
of translation phenomena. He was keen on using the LOB (Lancaster-Oslo-
Bergen) text corpus and even wrote a short manual for it in Danish. By the
late 1980s Jakobsen had built up his own Danish electronic corpus
(OVSDA), which was intended as a complement to an existing corpus of
original Danish novels. Remember that this was in the era before it was
possible to scan text and he had himself typed out no fewer than a thousand
extracts, each approximately 250 words in length, culled from fiction
translated from English into Danish between 1970 and 1975. OVSDA was
indexed using Word Cruncher. Word frequency and word collocation lists
were produced, forming the basis for certain of his publications on particles
and compounds (see below), all of which are replete with entertaining and
illustrative examples.
One publication arising from this painstaking work was Jakobsen
(1987), a significant corpus study illustrating differences in the frequency
of occurrence of a selection of words. An interesting example is provided
by the difficulties encountered when attempting to translate Danish modal
particles. An item like jo (in the sense “you know”, “you see”) is noticeably
more frequent in the corpus of novels written originally in Danish than in
the corpus of translated fiction. This far more restricted usage obviously
has an impact on the translations of source texts in which modality plays an
important role, and if one resorts to a translation using modal verbs or
adverbials, this results in a “distinct awkwardness of style” (1987: 104).
Arnt‟s work on corpora provided hard evidence for the frequent lack of
correspondence between the way meanings are mapped in original and
translated texts. The combination of working on word frequency lists and
his involvement in teaching courses on translation possibly sparked
Jakobsen‟s interest in lexicography. He wrote several reviews of
dictionaries, for instance, the NTC’s American Idioms Dictionary
(Jakobsen 1990); the very popular Danish–English dictionaries compiled
by Jens Axelsen, published by Gyldendal, commonly termed “Gyldendal‟s
red dictionaries” (Jakobsen 1991); and Politikens Visuelle Ordbog
(Jakobsen 1993). Consequently, the move to the study of compounds in the
early 1990s turned out to be not such a big step. Incidentally, the beginning
of this decade also marked the point at which Arnt switched to publishing
consistently in English, thus making his work accessible to a much wider
audience. A selection of his most important post-1992 publications on
translation written in English has been listed separately on pp. 33 to 36
(these are shown henceforth with an asterisk).
Arnt published several articles on the translation of compounds in
language for special purpose (LSP) texts, e.g. Jakobsen (1992a), and on
teaching translation of technical compounds, e.g. Jakobsen (*1992). For
these papers, he used for exemplification a comparison of the lexical
inventories of two Danish corpora, both of one million words, one being a
general Danish corpus and the other a biotechnological corpus. Arnt
retained his interest not only in the translation of compounds, but also of
16 Inger M. Mees
any other words in combination; in Jakobsen (*1996) he discusses the

difficulties encountered by translators when faced with translating
compounds, collocations, and modal and discourse particles.
LSP translation and first major project
Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word

weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and
the spirit gives life.
(Voltaire)
Arnt was now very conscious that Copenhagen Business School was
offering a degree in translating and interpreting. At Copenhagen University
he had been used to dealing with the translation of literary works, but now
legal, technical and economic language had to become an essential part of
his everyday life. He recognised that it was necessary for CBS to indicate
how different it was from the University, and from then on Arnt made it his
mission to emphasise the significance of LSP; perhaps not whole-heartedly
at first (he might be forgiven for remaining more enamoured of literature
than of LSP texts) – but with the realisation that this was what he had been
appointed to do and that there would be no future unless he accepted the
necessity of focussing on LSP. In 1990 he put in his first major application
for a project to be called Oversættelse af Fagsproglige Tekster”
(“Translating LSP Texts”) or OFT.
In that era, the pressure of having to obtain external funding was not
as significant as it is today but, characteristically, Arnt was ahead of his
time and could obviously sense the way things were developing. He spent
hours and hours writing the application, all the while downing gallons of
his favourite drink, coffee. His indefatigable efforts were rewarded: the
Danish Research Council for the Humanities allocated a huge grant (4.7
million Danish kroner) to OFT, and Arnt was appointed to act as its leader;
see Jakobsen (1992b) for an outline of its aims and objectives. The OFT
project ran from 1990 to 1994, involving 35 researchers from five different
Danish universities, and six different languages (Danish, English, German,
French, Spanish and Russian). Much thought had gone into its formulation.
Arnt‟s cultural background with its focus on literature and the
interpretation of texts forced him to realise that studying words in isolation
was not a fruitful enterprise. He remained faithful to his earlier view that
texts should be treated holistically and as culture-bound entities (semiotic
structures). This explains his insistence on focussing on translating LSP
texts and not merely translating LSP and so his overriding concern became
how language was actually used in the translation of authentic texts. The
LSP areas covered were IT, biotechnology and medicine. There were five
subprojects: (1) LSP translation theory in eastern Europe from 1970 to
1990; (2) translation theory of expert human translation of LSP texts; (3)
translation theory in connection with machine translation of LSP texts; (4)
meta-lexicography (specifically how translators draw on special-purpose
dictionaries); and (5) an applied project on the use of LSP contrastive
grammar for the translation of agro-industrial texts between Danish/English
and Russian (Jakobsen 1992b, *1994a). Arnt himself was involved in the
second of those listed above – one of his concerns being how translation
could be defined.
The teaching of translation

Translators live off the differences between languages, all the while working toward
eliminating them.
(Edmond Cary)
Apart from being engaged in research and heading the project, Arnt
continued to teach translation, and his experience as a teacher formed the
basis for insightful reflections on how translation skills could best be
acquired. In a talk given at a seminar on teaching methods organised by
CBS colleagues in the early 90s, Arnt adeptly transformed the Danish
saying Man må krybe før man kan gå (“You have to learn to walk before
you can run”) into “Man må skrive før man kan oversætte” (“You have to
learn to write before you can translate”). In Jakobsen (*1994d) he pursued
this line of thought, stating that translation is a special type of text
production. Inspired by the strong emphasis at the time on the function of
the target text, he observed that translation begins with the need for a target
text, and with all the usual questions we ask ourselves when we sit down to
write a text (p. 145). He argued that writing is a skill which precedes the art
of translation and that translation students should therefore first of all
concentrate on acquiring writing skills. To ensure this, a more process-
18 Inger M. Mees
oriented approach should be adopted in translation training, and use should

be made of what he termed “warm texts”, namely those characterised,
amongst other things, by a genuine communicative purpose. Teachers
should be seen as partners rather than instructors or assessors (see also
Kiraly 2000), and need to be present while the text is being composed so
that they can assist in what then becomes a collaborative writing task.
Arnt also brought other innovations into the CBS curriculum.
Spurred on by the importance he attached to writing skills, he developed a
new course Translation and Text Pragmatics, the aim of which was to
integrate translation theory, text typology and pragmatics both for general
and domain-specific texts. In addition, he has for many years advocated
multimedia approaches to teaching, and has repeatedly stated that students
no longer want mere printed pages, but are better motivated by a
combination of text, audio, video, animation and the interaction of all these.
He consistently aims at integrating new technology into classroom lessons,
an example being two courses on subtitling using new software.
Arnt has supervised numerous MA and PhD theses on translation,
and he allows PhD students almost unlimited access to his time. Apart from
discussing theoretical and methodological issues, he is always willing to
read drafts and manuscripts, and to provide guidance on improving aspects
of composition and structure. He has also sat on examiners‟ committees
assessing PhD theses both in Denmark and abroad. Many of these ex-
students now themselves hold positions at universities (some have indeed
also contributed to this volume, namely Barbara Dragsted, Mette Hjort-
Pedersen, Brenda Malkiel, and Sharon O‟Brien).
Outside the confines of the Business School, he has from the end of
the 1980s developed and taught courses with other CBS colleagues for the
National Association of the Local Authorities, the Local Government
Computing Centre and the Danish National Bank. Since 1982 he has been
an examiner for the Cambridge Local Examinations in Denmark, and from
1993-96 he was a delegate with responsibility for the Oxford International
Business Executive Certificate (OIBEC) in Denmark.
Definition of the concept of translation
Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as is possible, and moves the
reader towards him: or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves
the author towards him.
(Friedrich Schleiermacher)
In the 1980s one of the main discussions in the field of translation studies
centred around pinning down the concept of translation. I remember Arnt
being enchanted by Skopos theory and the function of the text, and how he
was absorbing the work of scholars such as Hans Hönig, Paul Kußmaul,
Hans Vermeer, Katharina Reiß, Christiane Nord and Justa Holz-Mänttäri.
Later on, he read Ernst-August Gutt‟s application of relevance theory to
translation with equal enthusiasm. He became ever more convinced that
translation should be seen as cross-cultural transfer and as the production
(or “creation” as he is wont to call it) of a text. In addition, the 1980s saw
the advent of cognitive empirical research. Ericsson and Simon‟s
introspective methods and Hans Krings‟s application of these awakened a
novel interest in what actually goes on during the process of translation. In
many ways, the OFT project united the issues Arnt himself found most
interesting, namely focus on complete texts, theoretical considerations, and
the integration of computer technology. Furthermore, the emphasis placed
on investigating the actual translation of LSP texts – as opposed to
focussing on terminology – was the main impetus for kindling his later
passion for the cognitive processes involved in translation.
All the above-mentioned translation scholars were trying to define
the concept of translation, for instance by debating the level of importance
of source as opposed to target texts. This discussion led to a paper entitled
“Translation as textual (re)production” (Jakobsen *1993) in which he
argued that it was fruitless to proclaim either source-text or target-text
hegemony. Translations are interlingual equivalents of existing texts with
which they have an intertextual relationship, but despite this obvious
dependence they nevertheless lead a life of their own. Thus translating
“always involves both textual production and textual reproduction” (1993:
74).
20 Inger M. Mees
Jakobsen (*1994b) concerns theories of translation types, discussing

the various criteria according to which translation has been categorised, i.e.
(1) the relation between the source and target texts, (2) the subject matter of
the source text, (3) the source text type and (4) the function of the target
text. Most schools of thought appear to divide translation into two
contrasting types which have been given many different labels, such as
literal/free, semantic/communicative, formal/dynamic, overt/covert, and
documentary/instrumental. But whatever the nomenclature, the underlying
criterion seems to be one of form vs. content. Jakobsen proposes his own
terms, imitative vs. functional, and reiterates his view that translation most
resembles ordinary text production. He concludes (p. 52):
Communicatively, translating is rather like writing love letters for a friend. The
translator must know his client‟s innermost intention and must know how this
intention can best be brought home to his client‟s intended audience. The
translator stands on the periphery of the interlingual communicative situation
offering professional language services to clients.
The OFT project can be regarded as Arnt‟s apprenticeship in

translation. Building on the solid foundations of his literary studies and his
powers of text analysis, combined with his dogged determination for
collecting and absorbing information, he gradually established himself in
this new field. In addition to giving him insight into the current trends in
translation theory, leading the project also gave Arnt Lykke Jakobsen
enviable experience in uniting different theoretical stances and many fields
of research such as linguistics, lexicography, and language technology. He
also found himself dealing with numerous different languages and cultural
traditions.
He has a remarkable talent for viewing theoretical positions from a
historical perspective, and so often one finds that listening to Arnt helps
one understand how a particular school of thought has changed and evolved
over the years. He is an excellent person to go to if one wishes to interpret
the complicated maze of modern terminology; postmodernism, inter-
textuality, constructivism, innovation and modelling are just a few of the
many topics I personally have discussed with him.
The year 1994 saw the end of the OFT project, through which over a
hundred related publications had come into being. Arnt organised a major
symposium to which opponents were invited to discuss the results of the
five above-mentioned subprojects (*1994a). It was a brave undertaking,

and one much more difficult to set up than the usual type of conference
where papers are read out followed by a few questions from the audience.
He sent the articles to experts in the field and invited them officially to
comment on the studies. For the language departments at CBS it was a
completely new way of approaching research. The symposium was a great
success and sticks in my memory as one of the most inspiring events I have
ever attended.
Head of department and administrative tasks
By the time the OFT project had finally been wrapped up, Arnt had got a
taste for co-ordinating people, teaching and research, and took on
leadership responsibilities as head of the English department from 1996 to
1998. Even though he fulfilled this role excellently, I think he was
somewhat disappointed at having to deal with so many routine matters that
were totally unrelated to research. Rather than the excitement of initiating
new projects, choosing new staff, organising conferences and PhD courses,
and providing inspiration to colleagues and younger researchers, he found
himself caught up in a multitude of run-of-the mill administrative problems
thrown up by the everyday running of the department. He longed to lead a
new research project and consequently decided against putting his name
forward for a second term as departmental head. Nevertheless, he
continued to assume many administrative duties and sat on numerous
boards, committees, working groups and task forces. He was, for example,
a member of the IT committee, the Faculty Board and the Academic
Council, and was appointed Director of Studies for the Open University
(Faculty of Language, Communication and Culture). He also undertook a
number of consultancy tasks, such as chairman of a committee assessing
the level of English in Upper Secondary Education for the Danish
Evaluation Institute, and consultant on the translation and interpreting
degrees in Estonia and Lithuania for the Danish Ministry of Education.
22 Inger M. Mees
Translation processes
Whilst the OFT project was running, Arnt was still much preoccupied with
the concept of translation and attempting to find a definition of what it
implied. The next step was moving from the actual translation of texts to
defining and describing the mental activity underlying translation – in other
words, a study of the cognitive processes. The first major project at CBS
focussing on these mental processes was TRAP (“Translation process”),
headed by Professor Gyde Hansen. This was once again a project funded
by the National Research Council for the Humanities; it began in 1996 and
ran for a period of five years.
No truly empirical research into translation processes took place until
the mid-1980s, largely owing to a lack of appropriate methodology.
Introspective methods had been rejected in the behaviourist paradigm and
consequently translation researchers were unwilling to utilise them.
However, Ericsson and Simon‟s (1980) article “Verbal reports as data” and
their later (1984) book Protocol Analysis distinguished different types of
introspection such as “think aloud” (as concurrent verbalisation) and
retrospection (both immediate and delayed). They assessed the data that
can be elicited by these methods against the background of an information-
processing model. As a consequence, researchers – particularly those
working in the field of translation studies – felt empowered to use
introspective methods once again, the first being Krings (1986); Göpferich
(2008: 16ff) provides further detail.
Although “think aloud” was intended to capture what was held in
short-term memory, so that we could get closer to understanding what goes
on in the translator‟s mind, it was difficult to analyse the data obtained in
this way. As numerous scholars have pointed out, there are several
disadvantages to this method. Firstly, the cognitive load may be too high
(thinking aloud is an additional activity superimposed on the activity of
translating a text and may interfere with the actual translation processes).
Secondly, it may be difficult for translators to put into words what they are
actually doing so that by no means everything is verbalised. Finally, some
processes may have become automatised so that they will not be
accompanied by any verbalisation. There seems to be universal consensus
that “think aloud” cannot be taken to be a direct manifestation of the

translator‟s mental processes.
Translog
During the OFT project, Jakobsen had been considering ways of

supplementing the traditional qualitative data gathered by means of verbal
protocolling with quantitative data. In the mid-1990s he developed a new
research tool which could be used to provide a parallel data set obtained
independently of think-aloud data. This new resource, which was able to
log keyboard activity during the entire translation process and register time
delay between the individual keystrokes, he called Translog. The original
DOS version appeared in 1996 to be followed in 1998 by Translog2000 for
Windows. In Jakobsen (*1998: 74) it is explained that Translog was
based on the idea that the process of writing a translation constitutes behaviour
that can be studied quantitatively – across time – and interpreted as a correlate of
mental processing. The assumption is further that it will be possible to
triangulate qualitative and quantitative data and test hypotheses derived from
analysis of qualitative data against quantitative data, and vice versa.
Arnt designed the program, but most of the actual programming was
carried out by his son, Lasse Schou. The first full Translog documentation
appeared a year later (Jakobsen and Schou *1999); for an account of the
development of the program in its many incarnations, and its uses see
Schou et al. (this volume). A description of how the data are recorded, and
how they can be represented and analysed, can be found in Jakobsen
(*1999). In a manner characteristic of his intellectual generosity, Arnt has
made the program freely available to the scientific community. Many of the
contributors to this volume (including myself) were among the earliest
users of the original DOS version, for example Fabio Alves, Susanne
Göpferich, Gyde Hansen, Brenda Malkiel, Ricardo Muñoz and Anthony
Pym. The Windows version together with the creation of a homepage
(http://Translog.dk) further expanded the employment of the technology
worldwide. Jakobsen (*2006) provides a summary of what had so far been
achieved with Translog. It discusses the development of the program and
how this resource can be used for translation experiments – either on its
own or together with other data elicitation methods. Although Translog was
24 Inger M. Mees
intended as a research tool, it also turned out to be popular as an

educational aid and was utilised as a new means of teaching translation in a
process-oriented manner. Colleagues both at CBS and outside Denmark
(e.g. Don Kiraly and Hannelore Lee-Jahnke) eagerly grasped this
opportunity for introducing a new approach to translator training.
The members of the TRAP project, which included researchers from
the English, German and Spanish departments, eagerly took on board this
new research tool for their studies and used it in conjunction with other
approaches (introspection, retrospection and video recording); the first
results were published in Copenhagen Studies in Language 24 (Hansen
1999). One of the earliest PhD studies to use Translog was that conducted
by Astrid Jensen, who employed the program together with think-aloud
methodology to investigate the effects of time pressure on two non-
translators, two novice translators and two professional translators. A
summary of the thesis is available in Jensen and Jakobsen (*2000a). Some
interesting findings were that time pressure decreased problem-solving
activity during revision, that expert translators use dictionaries far less
frequently than novices and non-translators, and also that they opt for
paraphrase as a strategy far more often than do members of the two other
groups.
Jakobsen (*2000b) discusses the three main ways computers can be
used by translators: (1) as text processors (electronic typewriters); (2) to
assist with translation (translation software such as translation memory
systems); and (3) as fully automated translation systems. He then
introduces likely future technologies such as speech recognition and on-line
feedback systems. The latter serve two purposes, namely to strengthen
learning and to enhance performance. Arnt often shows a remarkable talent
for analogies, comparisons and allusions, and here one finds an excellent
example: “An aeroplane pilot can estimate his altitude and speed by
looking at the earth and getting visual feedback, but feedback from reliable
instruments will both provide him with more exact information and sharpen
his ability to estimate altitude and speed accurately” (p. 22). On-line is
superior to off-line feedback as it allows the pilot (or the translator) to
make adjustments during the process. It is then explained that even though
Translog was originally designed as a research tool, not only has it turned
out to be in addition a useful learning aid but it can also probably be

developed as an on-line feedback system.
Jakobsen (*2000c) describes how Translog might be employed to
investigate the nature of the translation process, which can be shown to
consist of three phases: planning, text generation and revision. Experiments
so far have revealed that during text production there are longer delays at
sentence boundaries, which are either forward-looking processing delays or
backward-looking monitoring delays (p. 165). One of the issues taken up is
how information about time delay can contribute towards our
understanding of the type of chunking (segmentation) that takes place
during translation, and in Jakobsen (*2005a, *2005b) this question is
further developed. Jakobsen (*2002) examines the distribution of time and
cognitive resources in the three translation phases. In a comparison of the
performance of professionals and students, it was found that experts
produced target text faster and that the text was more durable (p. 203).
Thus the professionals‟ solutions were more likely to be retained than those
of the students, which proved more unstable.
A recent experiment using Translog is Jakobsen et al. (*2007a)
describing a study involving the processing of twelve English idioms when
translated into Danish by five professional translators and when sight
translated by five interpreters. It was shown that sentences containing
idioms required more processing time than sentences without, and that
sight translation was faster than typing a translation. The first inclination of
the translators was to search for solutions based on idiom-to-idiom
translation, whereas the interpreters were more likely to opt for paraphrase
and non-cognate solutions.
At the present time Translog still retains its position as a prime
research tool for a wide range of experiments, as evidenced by recent
collections such as Göpferich et al. (*2008d, *2009) in which Arnt has also
been involved.
The effect of thinking aloud on the translation process
Arnt grew more and more fascinated by the ways in which computers could
assist translators. It is therefore not surprising that he produced a review
(Jakobsen *2003a) of a work which had greatly impressed him, namely,
26 Inger M. Mees
Hans Krings‟s (2001) magnum opus on the processes involved in post-

editing machine translation. Using introspective methods (especially think-
aloud methodology) for his empirical study, Krings examined how human
translators process raw machine-translated texts, and compared this with
the processing of texts in conventional human translation. In his review,
Jakobsen discusses the pros and cons of using concurrent verbalisation, an
issue with which he himself was very much preoccupied at the time (see
Jakobsen *2003b below; 2005a; 2005b).
Jakobsen (2003b) is a valuable contribution to an ongoing
methodological debate. Here he describes an experiment involving four
translation students and five professionals. Each performed two translations
from Danish into English and vice versa. All keystrokes were logged using
Translog, and one of the texts was accompanied by concurrent
verbalisation. The main aim was to discover whether and, if so, to what
extent, thinking aloud affected the speed of translation, the degree of
revision and the nature of segmentation. As predicted, thinking aloud
slowed down translation (as it turned out, by about 25 per cent). Revision
was not affected but, contrary to Jakobsen‟s original expectations, there
were significant effects on the chunking of segments – the processed units
being much smaller in the think-aloud condition.
Expert performance
In December 2000, Jakobsen‟s achievements were recognised when he was

awarded the Hedorf Foundation Award for outstanding business language
research. Andrew Chesterman of the University of Helsinki was the guest
speaker on this memorable occasion. Arnt chose to spend the grant on a
visit to Stanford University where in 2002 he was able to meet Professor
K. A. Ericsson, who was at that time Visiting Professor at the Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His fruitful discussions with
Ericsson led to the formulation of two new research projects based on ideas
derived from expertise theory, one on peak performance by expert
translators and the other on professional language translation; the resulting
articles, both drawing on the data in Jakobsen (*2003b), appeared in 2005.
Jakobsen (*2005a) examines how language is processed by
translation students as compared with professional translators, and
specifically how pauses might potentially indicate a cognitive rhythm. This

would be manifested if it were possible to detect particular patterns of
distribution which differed in experts vis-à-vis students; in fact, his results
indicated that expert translators did indeed process longer units than
students. Furthermore, their segments were longer when translating from
L2 to L1 than when translating into the L2. Both the quantitative data and
the think-aloud data showed that experts also generated a higher number of
translation alternatives. Whilst that article is concerned with differences
between students and professionals, the emphasis in Jakobsen (*2005b) is
on experts and peak performance in translation. A phenomenon which
emerged was the “occasional occurrence of very long segments within the
regular rhythm of translation experts‟ target text production, not only in
routine tasks, where it might be expected, but also in non-routine tasks” (p.
113). Since the processing cannot be explained simply as a result of
identical processing at different speeds, it is argued that such observations
may perhaps be interpretable in terms of expertise theory (as developed by
Ericsson and colleagues). It is postulated that processing related to peak
performance “involves a higher level of organisation and integration of
processes, not just higher processing speed” (p. 115).
Centre of excellence in 2005 and professorship in 2007
The enormous time and effort invested by Arnt

and his colleagues in the development and use of
Translog and the study of translation processes and cognition culminated in
the establishment of a centre of excellence. In June 2005, the Center for
Research and Innovation in Translation and Translation Technology
(CRITT) was founded with Arnt as Research Director. Andrew Chesterman
and Miriam Shlesinger (of Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv) were among the
scholars invited to give papers at the inauguration. Being ambitious and
never afraid of involving experts outside CBS, Jakobsen established an
advisory board with close connections to the business world and to
institutions, organisations and researchers in many other countries.
(Anthony Pym from Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, is one of the
members.) After its establishment the centre took over the ongoing research
28 Inger M. Mees
on cognitive processes in translation and on the use of technological tools –

an indispensable part of the armamentarium of the modern translator.
Fourteen CBS researchers have joined CRITT. The aims of the
centre are described on its homepage (http://www.cbs.dk/critt):
Its primary obligation is to research translation processes with a view to further
develop technologies for monitoring such processes (based on Translog) and to
developing technologies to support translation.
Research is also aimed at investigating new forms of collaboration that develop

as translation becomes a global 24/7 industry driven by information technology
and the forces of globalisation and localisation.
On the one hand, the centre‟s research looks outward at the transformational
processes in organisations and societies that are significant features of
globalisation, and, on the other hand, it looks inward at the mental and language
processes which constitute translational expertise.
One of the first initiatives taken was to write an application, together

with members of the EXPERTISE network, for an EU Information Society
Technology project (6th Framework Programme). A generously funded
project, Eye-to-IT, which started in January 2006, saw completion in April
2009. Researchers included colleagues from Norway, Finland, Austria and
Bulgaria, and also an industrial partner, Tobii, who provided the eye-
tracking equipment. The aim was to develop human-computer monitoring
and feedback systems to study cognition and translation. Translog was to
be integrated with two other technologies, EEG (electroencephalography)
and eye-tracking – and researchers at CBS were to concentrate on the last
of these.
Translog had contributed greatly to our knowledge of translation
processes by making it possible to study the writing process in translation
by logging keyboard activity and registering pauses in writing.
Nevertheless, it remained unclear what type of processing actually took
place during the pauses – this could be anything from reading or
interpreting the source text, considering target-text alternatives, reading and
checking the target text while it was being produced, or an activity totally
unrelated to translation. The introduction of eye-tracking research is
beginning to fill in the missing information. By combining eye-tracking
and key-logging in one application, it is proving possible to synchronise
translators‟ typing with their gaze activities, and in this way achieve a more
realistic interpretation of what kind of cognitive processing goes on during

the pauses.
In addition to the expected theoretical output, the Eye-to-IT project
formulated ambitious aims with regard to practical results, something
which corresponded well with the innovation component of CRITT. One of
the aims was to show that a translator‟s need for help could be detected by
observation of the translator‟s eye movements. A scheme was set in motion
for developing a means of locating at what point in the process of
translation those taking part would experience problems and need
assistance, and then for the computer to provide suggested solutions.
Experiments would be designed in which participants were asked to
undertake translation tasks within various fixed time limits, so as to enable
researchers to determine at what point time pressure proves too great to
permit completion of the assignment. This again could be the point when
resources (for example, translation suggestions) would be made available.
In consequence, eye-tracking technology will register longer-than-normal
fixations and also trigger a prompt in the system.
A number of other projects, both funded and non-funded, have been
initiated by the centre, some of which have been completed whilst others
still in progress. We may cite the following: “Comprehension and text
production in translation and interpreting/translation hybrids”, “IntelliGet”,
“Cognitive processing in the translation of legal texts”, “Simultaneous
subtitling”, “A longitudinal study of Störquellen in the translation process”,
“Multimedia and Interpreting” (completed 2007), and an EU Leonardo
project, eCoLoRe (completed 2005). More information concerning these is
available on the CRITT website.
In 2007, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen was appointed “Professor with special
responsibilities”. His duties included generating research and methodo-
logical and technological innovation (as is evident from the name of the
centre of which he is the head). By this time, he had managed to obtain
funding from various sources, both EU and the National Research Council.
Projects were going well, PhD students were being attracted to the centre,
and strong collaboration ties were being established with leading scholars
based at universities not only in Denmark but also elsewhere in the world.
Today, the centre is flourishing and its activities have greatly expanded.
Professor Jakobsen has recently drawn up a CRITT development plan
30 Inger M. Mees
(2009–2012), which aims at: (1) integrating research more with

computational linguistics; (2) including research into multimedia
translation (e.g. the use of speech recognition technology to “speak a
translation”); and (3) exploring the possibilities of developing income-
generating business services, especially in the field of eye-tracking. Many
of these activities are in fact already well under way.
Studies using Translog in conjunction with eye-tracking
As has been outlined above, since the launch of CRITT work has
concentrated on integrating eye-tracking research with Translog. The first
studies are already in existence and are collected in Göpferich et al.
(*2008d); for a brief description, see Göpferich et al. (*2008c). Jakobsen
and Jensen (*2008a) describes an experiment in which eye movements
were tracked while 12 translators (six professionals and six students) read
four almost identical texts with different purposes in mind: (1)
comprehension; (2) with the instruction of having to translate the text
afterwards; (3) in combination with oral translation; and (4) in combination
with written translation. Task times, fixation frequency, gaze times and
duration of fixations were all measured, indicating that there was a linear
progression in attention from the first task to the last. The results for Task 4
revealed that students directed more visual attention to the source text than
to the target text, while the reverse was true for the professionals.
Sharmin et al. (*2008b), a development of a poster session (Sharmin
et al. *2008e), also examines eye movement. Three different texts (one
easy and two difficult) were read by 18 translation students under three
different time constraints. When less time was available, the average
duration of fixations on the source text was reduced, whilst making the text
more complex had the effect of increasing the number of fixations – though
not their duration. In addition, it was found that average fixation duration
was consistently longer in the TT area than in the ST area.
The latest developments are directed towards establishing yet
stronger ties with computational linguists, and have led to ideas for new
research methods for the study of human translation processes. Eye-
tracking and keystroke logging will be employed to monitor subjects while
they read or translate a text. Using the data thus collected, it is hoped to
develop a statistical computer model able to simulate the process. Work on

finding annotation standards for eye-tracking data is currently in progress
(Carl et al. 2008f). A new term, “user-activity data”, has been coined to
designate any type of product or process data generated by a translator
during a translation session; see Carl et al. (2008g, 2008h; Carl, this
volume).
Tribute from colleagues and friends
Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet the work is and will always be
one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.
(Johann Goethe)
We have deliberately entitled this tribute “portrait of an innovator”. Arnt

Lykke Jakobsen has brought innovation – in every sense of the word – to
the field of translation. Not only has he introduced new methods and ideas,
but he has also brought about innovation in a more modern sense, namely
that of developing commercial products.
A dedicated professor doesn‟t work merely for his own benefit but
on behalf of his subject and in the interest of the next generation. Arnt is
just such a man. He has invested much time in writing applications for
funding, supervising students, establishing networks, organising research,
writing both progress reports and final reports, and reading up on related
research areas so that work on translation can benefit from the cross-
fertilisation of ideas. In so doing he has created a dynamic, creative and
rewarding research environment able to attract both PhD students and
leading scholars from abroad. He is a man of many talents who combines
all these with an amazing capacity for work. Largely as a result of his
efforts and achievements we know a great deal more about the translation
process today than we did 15 years ago.
A substantial number of process studies have been collected in the
latest issues of Copenhagen Studies in Language. CSL 36 is devoted
entirely to eye-tracking studies, and CSL 37 to other types of process
studies using Translog and/or think-aloud methodology. The last three
issues of the journal (CSL 35, 36 and 37) have been co-edited by Arnt
working in collaboration with various editorial teams. For obvious reasons,
32 Inger M. Mees
he has had no hand in this particular volume (CSL 38), which is a labour of
love, compiled as a special tribute to him from his colleagues and many
friends at home and abroad.
References
Einersen, D. and Jakobsen, A. L. 1984. Between antinomies and beyond:

fundamental concepts in D.H. Lawrence. In H. Ringbom & M. Rissanen
(eds). Papers from the Second Nordic Conference for English Studies.
Helsinki. 543–557.
Einersen, D. and Jakobsen, A. L. (eds). 1985. Den levende Lawrence. Artikler om
D.H. Lawrence i anledning af 100-året for hans fødsel. [The Living
Lawrence. Articles about D.H. Lawrence on the 100th anniversary of his
birth.]. Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag.
Ericsson, K.A. and Simon, H.A. (1980). Verbal reports as data. Psychological
Review 87: 215–251.
Ericsson, K.A. & Simon, H.A. 1993 [1984]. Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports
as Data. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Göpferich, S. (2008). Translationsprozessforschung: Stand – Methoden –
Perspektiven. (Translationswissenschaft 4). Tübingen: Narr.
Hansen, G. (ed.) 1999. Probing the Process in Translation: Methods and Results.
(Copenhagen Studies in Language 24). Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.
Jakobsen, A. L. 1977. A critique of Wayne C. Booth‟s A Rhetoric of Irony. Orbis
Litterarum 32: 173–195.
Jakobsen, A. L. 1980. Introduction and Notes to Malcolm Lowry’s Under the
Volcano. (Anglica et Americana 11). Department of English, University of
Copenhagen.
Jakobsen, A. L. 1981. Malcolm Lowry‟s Under the Volcano. In S. Johansson and
B. Tysdahl (eds). Papers from the First Nordic Conference for English
Studies. Oslo. 83–94.
Jakobsen, A. L. 1982. An analysis of hypostasis forms. Acta Linguistica
Hafniensia 17(1): 3–13.
Jakobsen, A.L. 1985a. Om at læse Lawrence i 1985. [About reading Lawrence in
1985] In Einersen & Jakobsen (eds). 25–33.
Jakobsen, A. L. 1985b. D.H. Lawrence i Danmark, 1932–1982. In Einersen &
Jakobsen (eds). 167–186.
Jakobsen, A. L. 1985c. Oversættelse og lokalisering [Translation and
localisation]. In 3 studier i oversættelse [3 studies in translation In] (ARK
24). Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School. 5–16.
Jakobsen, A. L. 1987. Lexical selection and creation in translation. I. Lindblad
and M. Ljung (eds) Proceedings from the Third Nordic Conference for
English Studies (Vol. I). Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell (Acta
Universitatis Stockholmiensis LXXIII). 101–112.
Jakobsen, A. L. 1988. The earliest translations from English into Danish (c.
1640–1666). In G.D. Caie and H. Nørgaard (eds) A Literary Miscellany,
presented to Eric Jacobsen. Publications of the Department of English 16.
367–387.
Jakobsen, A. L. 1990. Review of NTC’s American Idioms Dictionary (ed. R.A.
Spears). Sprint 2: 74–79.
Jakobsen, A. L. 1991. Review of Jens Axelsen. Dansk–engelsk. Undervisning.
Gyldendals røde ordbøger. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Hermes: Journal of
Linguistics 7: 117–121.
Jakobsen, A. L. 1992a. Oversættelse af komposita i fagsproglige tekster (Eng–
da/da–eng). Hermes: Journal of Linguistics 8: 29–42.
Jakobsen, A. L. 1992b. Oversættelse af fagsproglige tekster [Translation of LSP
texts]. In Jakobsen (ed.) Oversættelse af fagsproglige tekster. Indlæg fra
Sandbjerg-konferencen, 21.–22. november 1991 [Translation of LSP texts.
Papers at the Sandbjerg conference, 21–22 November 1991]. (ARK 65).
Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School. 1–23.
Jakobsen, A. L. 1993. Review of Politikens Visuelle Ordbog. Sprint 1: 58–63.
Jakobsen, A. L. 2007. The reception of D. H. Lawrence in Denmark. In C.
Jansohn and D. Mehl (eds). The Reception of D. H. Lawrence in Europe.
London: Continuum. 255–264.
Jarvella, R. J., Bang, E., Jakobsen, A. L. & Mees, I. M. 2001. Of mouths and
men: non-native listeners‟ identification and evaluation of varieties of
English. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 11 (1): 37-56.
Kiraly, D. 2000: A Social Constructivist Approach to Translator Education:
Empowerment from Theory to Practice. Manchester (UK): Northampton
(MA): St. Jerome.
Krings, H. P. (1986) Was in den Köpfen von Übersetzern vorgeht. Eine
empirische Untersuchung zur Struktur der Übersetzungsprozesses bei
fortgeschrittenen Französischlernern. Tübingen: Narr.
Selected publications1
Arnt Lykke Jakobsen
1992 Teaching translation of technical compounds. In C. Dollerup and A.

Loddegaard (eds). Teaching Translation and Interpreting: Training,
Talent and Experience. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 129–135.
1993 Translation as textual (re)production. In J. Holz-Mänttäri & C. Nord

(eds). Traducere Navem. Festschrift für Katharina Reiß zum 70.
Geburtstag. Tampere: University of Tampere (= studia
translatologica, ser. A, vol. 3). 65–76.
1
Only published work in the field of translation is included. Papers in Danish and
publications on topics other than translation have been omitted.
34 Inger M. Mees
1994a Jakobsen, A. L. (ed.). 1994a. Translating LSP Texts. Conference

papers for the OFT Symposium 11–12 April, 1994, Copenhagen
Business School.
1994b Towards a definition of translation types. In Jakobsen 1994c (ed.).

33–56.
1994c (ed.) Translating LSP Texts: Some Theoretical Considerations.

(Copenhagen Studies in Language 16). Copenhagen:
Samfundslitteratur.
1994d Starting from the (other) end: integrating translation with text
production. In C. Dollerup & A. Lindegaard (eds). Teaching
Translation and Interpreting 2: Insights, Aims, Visions. Amsterdam:
Benjamins. 143–150.
1996 Translating between English and Danish: pitfalls and problems. In G.

Anderman and C. Banér (eds). Proceedings of the Tenth Biennial
Conference of the British Association of Scandinavian Studies,
University of Surrey. 67–76.
1998 Logging time delay in translation. In G. Hansen (ed.). LSP Texts and
the Process of Translation. (Copenhagen Working Papers in LSP 1)
Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School. 73–101.
1999 Logging target text production with Translog. In G. Hansen (ed).

Probing the Process in Translation. Methods and Results.
(Copenhagen Studies in Language 24.) Copenhagen: Samfunds-
litteratur. 9–20.
1999 (With L. Schou) Translog documentation. In G. Hansen (ed.) Probing

the Process in Translation. Methods and Results. (Copenhagen
Studies in Language 24.) Copenhagen: Samfunds-litteratur. Appendix
1. 151–186.
2000a (With A. Jensen) Translating under time pressure: an empirical

investigation of problem-solving activity and translation strategies
by non-professional and professional translators. In A. Chesterman,
N. Gallardo San Salvador & Y. Gambier (eds). Translation in
Context. Selected Papers from the EST Congress, Granada 1998.
Benjamins: Amsterdam. 105–116.
2000b Probing the translation process. Synaps 5: 18–35.
2000c Understanding the process of translation: the contribution of time-

delay studies. In B. Englund Dimitrova (ed.). Översättning och
tolkning. Rapport från ASLA:s höstsymposium, Stockholm, 5–6
november 1998, ASLA, Uppsala, 155–172.
2002 Translation drafting by professional translators and by translation

students. In G. Hansen (ed.) Empirical Translation Studies.
(Copenhagen Studies in Language 27) Copenhagen: Samfunds-
litteratur. 191–204. (Also in E. Sánchez Trigo & O. Díaz Fouces
(eds). Traducción & Comunicación 3 : 89–103.)
2003a Review of H. P. Krings (2001). Repairing Texts. Empirical

Investigations of Machine Translation Post-editing Processes.
[Texte reparieren: Empirische Untersuchungen zum Prozeß der
Nachredaktion von Maschinenübersetzungen.] Ed. by Geoffrey S.
Koby, transl. by Geoffrey S. Koby, Gregory M. Shreve, Katja
Mischerikow, and Sara Litzer. Kent, Ohio and London: Kent State
University Press. Target 15 (2): 376–380.
2003b Effects of think aloud on translation speed, revision and

segmentation. In F. Alves (ed.) Triangulating Translation.
Perspectives in Process Oriented Research, Benjamins. (Benjamins
Translation Library 45) Amsterdam: Benjamins. 69–95.
2005a Investigating expert translators‟ processing knowledge. In H.V. Dam,

J. Engberg, H. Gerzymisch-Arbogast (eds). Knowledge Systems and
Translation. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 173–189.
2005b Instances of peak performance in translation. Lebende Sprachen 50

(3): 111–116.
2006 Research methods in translation – Translog. In K.P.H. Sullivan and

E. Lindgren (eds). Computer Keystroke Logging and Writing:
Methods and Applications. Oxford/Amsterdam: Elsevier. 95–105.
2007a (with K.T.H. Jensen and I.M. Mees) Comparing modalities: idioms
as a case in point. In F. Pöchhacker, A.L. Jakobsen and I.M. Mees.
Interpreting Studies and Beyond. A Tribute to Miriam Shlesinger.
(Copenhagen Studies in Language 35) Copenhagen :
Samfundslitteratur. 217–249.
36 Inger M. Mees
2007b (eds) (with F. Pöchhacker and I.M. Mees). Interpreting Studies and
Beyond. A Tribute to Miriam Shlesinger. (Copenhagen Studies in
Language 35) Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.
2008a (With K. T. H. Jensen). Eye movement behaviour across four

different types of reading task. In S. Göpferich, A. L. Jakobsen &
I. M. Mees (eds). 2008d. 103–124.
2008b (With S. Sharmin, O. Špakov & K.-J. Räihä) Where on the screen
do translation students look while translating, and for how long? In
S. Göpferich, A.L. Jakobsen & I.M. Mees (eds) 2008d. 31–51.
2008c (With S. Göpferich and I. M. Mees) Introduction: looking at the

eyes of translators. In S. Göpferich, A. L. Jakobsen & I. M. Mees
(eds). 2008d. 1–7.
2008d (With S. Göpferich and I. M. Mees) (eds) Looking at Eyes: Eye-

Tracking Studies of Reading and Translation Processing.
litteratur.
2008e (With S. Sharmin, O. Špakov & K.-J. Räihä) Effects of time

pressure and text complexity on translators‟ fixations. Proceedings
of the Eye Tracking Research and Applications Symposium
(ETRA08). Savannah, Georgia. 26–28 March. 123–126.
2008f (With M. Carl and O. Špakov) Towards an annotation standard for

eye tracking data. Proceedings of Measuring Behavior 2008: 6th
International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral
Research, August 26–29. Maastricht, the Netherlands. Noldus. 223.
2008g (With M. Carl and K. T. H. Jensen). Modelling human translator

behaviour with user-activity data. Proceedings of the 12th EAMT
Conference, 22–23 September 2008. Hamburg, Germany. 21–26.
2008h (With M. Carl and K.T.H. Jensen). Studying human translator

behavior with user-activity data. Proceedings of NLPCS workshop
at ICEIS, Barcelona. 114–123.
2009 (With S. Göpferich and I. M. Mees) (eds) Behind the Mind:

Methods, Models and Results in Translation Process Research.
litteratur.
Ten years of Translog
Lasse Schou, Barbara Dragsted and Michael Carl
Translog data do not speak until we begin to theorise about them. [...] Only if we
succeed in developing ideas of how translation comes into being, can we begin to
make sense of Translog data. (Jakobsen 1999: 15)
Abstract
2009 is not only the year of Arnt’s 65th birthday; it is also the 10th
anniversary of one of his greatest accomplishments: the creation and
documentation of Translog. The basic idea of developing a tool for logging the
translator’s keystrokes was conceived by Arnt back in 1995, while the first
comprehensive description of its potential, together with a manual, appeared
ten years ago in an edited volume (Hansen 1999). This paper gives a review of
how Translog has evolved, where Translog is used and what the main areas of
research are. The programming and development of Translog has taken place
in close collaboration with Arnt’s eldest son, Lasse Schou. The first section is
his account of how it all started and how Translog has developed over the past
ten years. The second and third sections give an overview of where and how
Translog is used.
1. Lasse Schou’s account of the development of Translog
The Translog project was initiated in 1995 one morning when Arnt came to
me in the dining room and showed me a couple of handwritten notes. He was
very excited about this new idea he had of developing a computer program
that would revolutionise the world of translation research by recording every
keystroke in a text production session, and afterwards replaying the whole
thing on screen. Another important function, the linear representation of
events in the production process, was also already on the drawing board.
38 Lasse Schou, Barbara Dragsted & Michael Carl
I had been programming ever since my dad had bought an Amstrad PC

back in 1987, with two 5.25” floppy drives, no hard drive, 512 KB memory
and a 4.77 MHz processor. I had mostly programmed small games, but also a
library program for indexing all Arnt’s books (a project that was never to
succeed because of the vastness of the task – Arnt has more than 8000 books
in the house). But the time for a serious and useful application had come, and I
started the development of Translog version 1.0 in my favourite Turbo Pascal
environment. Windows programming wasn’t really my thing at that time, so
the program was written for the good old MS-DOS environment featuring an
80-by-25-character screen with 16 colours.
1.1 The first Translog version
Translog 1.0 had two main components: a component for recording sessions
(called Writelog) and a component for playing back and displaying the linear
representation (called Translog). Mouse movements were not part of the set-
up back then, but many of the basic features known from the latest Translog
version were actually present: displaying a source text with different timing
possibilities, dictionary look-ups, the use of different time values for the red
asterisk representing a pause, and replaying the log file at different speeds.
Timing, however, was a bit of a problem in version 1 because of the coarse-
grained resolution of the DOS clock that ticked away at a rate of 55
milliseconds. Although it may not sound all that bad, the playback was
noticeably affected when replaying fast typing.
1.2 Addressing the Windows users’ needs
The timing issue, among many others, was addressed in the next version,
Translog 2000, which was programmed in the Windows environment for the
first time, using Delphi as development tool. The user experience was
enhanced a great deal, the tasks were generally easier for the users to perform,
and the mouse was finally recognised as a user input tool worth logging. The
program now looked like a professional market product and was distributed at
a quicker pace than its predecessor because it was no longer necessary to
Ten years of Translog 39
throw a floppy disk in an envelope and send it via snail mail – you could just
email it around the globe. As for timing, the new component had, with its
overkill of 0.5 microsecond precision, an unfortunate impact on the processor,
which was jammed most of the time with 100 % usage, causing other running
software to protest fiercely.
1.3 Eye tracking was introduced
In 2002 Arnt participated in an EU research event in Copenhagen where he

was introduced to the field of eye tracking. This sparked the idea that Translog
could be integrated with eye-tracking software, thereby capturing both the
user input (the eye gaze on the source text on screen) and the output (the
keystrokes and mouse movements). The ideas had to wait a few years, but in
2005 a proposal submitted to the EU 7th Framework Programme (FP7) was
accepted. CBS participated in the project entitled “Eye-to-IT” with researchers
from five other countries, and I was involved in the Translog development as a
subcontractor on a three-year basis.
1.4 Back to the lab again
My work started with a third complete rewrite of the source code. The latest
craze in the Microsoft development world was WinForms and C# 2.0, which I
had gained some experience in, and which was a natural choice of platform.
The new version was, imaginatively, called Translog 2006, and came with
many new features, including Unicode support (a feature widely requested in
the countries with non-Latin alphabets), XML support, multiple log file
support and richer source text/stimulus functions. But the hottest and most
eagerly anticipated new thing was of course the integration with eye-tracking
software and the ability to both record and play back eye movements and
words in focus through Translog.
During the development of the 2006 version, the Translog website
(www.translog.dk) was equipped with a rather advanced ordering and
activation system where the software could be freely downloaded for
academic purposes, but where users had to activate the software and thereby
lock the license to their computer. This mechanism ensured that all versions
were downloaded from a central place with the latest patches instead of
spreading in the wild, allowing us to keep track of downloads around the
world; cf. below.
The Eye-to-IT project was successfully wrapped up in the spring of
2009, and current development is focusing on creating a new ready-to-ship
version where audio recording, eye tracking and keystroke logging are
integrated into one software bundle. So after 14 years of development the idea
is still alive and kicking, and the software has proved its value to researchers
all over the world.
2. Where is Translog used?
Since the first version of Translog was released and described in 1999, the tool
has gradually found its way to research and teaching institutions throughout
the world. The list of Translog users ten years after its launch includes 97
universities and four private/individual users in 45 different countries in all
continents all over the world.
Table 1. Number of Translog installations across the globe

Europe China (incl. Other Asian South North Australia Africa
Hong Kong + countries America America
Taiwan) (incl.
Mexico)
50 18 11 9 7 3 1
Table 1 gives an overview of the usage of Translog across the globe. More
than half the Translog installations (50) are running on European computers,
followed by China (18) and the rest of Asia (11), from Turkey to Indonesia
and Japan. Seven out of the nine South American installations are
concentrated in Brazil, while institutions in North America (USA, Mexico and
Canada) have downloaded the software seven times. Finally, Australia has
three installations while Africa has one (in Egypt).
3. How is Translog used?
By far the majority of users state research as the primary objective of

employing Translog (84 users), but the program is also widely used for
translator training, teaching and learning purposes (22 users). The
dissemination of Translog among translation scholars has contributed to
numerous articles and conference papers, mainly in the area of translation
process research, but also in the field of translator training. The list of
references gives an overview of the literature that we have been able to collect
(although it may not be exhaustive); Figure 1 shows the distribution of
publications over the past 10 years.
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
Figure 1. Number of scientific publications using Translog as data acquisition
technology
Peaks in publications can be seen in 1999, 2002, 2003, and over the past five
years, there has been an (almost) steady increase. The early peaks are mainly
due to the two volumes edited by Gyde Hansen (1999 and 2002) in which
much of the early work on Translog is accumulated. Another volume, edited
by Fabio Alves, appeared in 2003 and also incorporates a number of
publications drawing on Translog data. In the wake of the Eye-to-IT project,
there was another boom of Translog- and eye-tracking-related publications in
2008 and 2009, with several edited volumes in the Copenhagen Studies in
Language series (Pöchhacker et al. 2007, Göpferich et al. 2008, Göpferich et
al. 2009).
Publications drawing on Translog for studies of translator training

include, for instance, Alves and Magalhães (2004), Alves (2005a), Malkiel
(2006), Hansen (2006) and Lee-Jahnke (2007). Furthermore, a number of
process studies are based on data from translation students and novices and
have pedagogical implications, e.g. Livbjerg and Mees (2003), Dragsted
(2005), Trandem (2005), Denver (2007), Jakobsen and Jensen (2008), Malkiel
(2009), Dragsted and Hansen (2009).
The constant challenge of translation process research is to understand –
based on the activities that we are able to monitor and observe – how the
translator transforms meaning in the source language into meaning in the
target language. Keystroke logging with Translog has proved useful to gain
more insight into what takes place in the translator’s black box (Hansen 2002,
Heiden 2005), very often in combination with other methods such as think
aloud and retrospection (e.g. Hansen 1999, Livbjerg and Mees 1999, Jensen
1999, Jakobsen 2003, Rydning Fougner 2002, Alves 2003a, Trandem 2005,
Rodrigues do Vale 2008, Denver 2007) and, more recently, eye tracking (e.g.
Carl et al. 2008, Jakobsen and Jensen 2008, Sharmin et al. 2008b, Dragsted
and Hansen 2008, Jakobsen 2009, Alves et al., this volume), emphasising the
triangulation approach and translation scholars’ wish to “apply several
instruments of data gathering and analysis in their attempts to throw light on
the nature of the process of translation” (Alves 2003b: VII). Other
triangulation methods include video recording (Dragsted and Hansen 2009),
screen recording (Göpferich 2009) and triangulation of product and process
data (Carl, this volume).
Translog has been used for investigating a range of different translator
behaviour phenomena and cognitive processes, e.g. pauses/segmentation
(Lorenzo 1999, Jakobsen 2003, Dragsted 2005, Buchweitz and Alves 2006,
Immonen 2006, O’Brien 2006, Alves and Vale 2009), revision and self-
corrections (Tirkkonen-Condit et al. 2008, Malkiel 2009, Carl, this volume),
inferencing (Alves and Gonçalves 2003, Alves 2007, Denver 2007, Faber and
Hjort-Pedersen 2009), memory constraints (Rothe-Neves 2003),
representation of motion (Rydning Fougner 2008), awareness of translation
processes (Alves 2005b, Magalhães and Alves 2006, Hansen 2006) and of the
communicative situation (Trandem 2005), and shifts in attention (Jensen

2009).
Furthermore, Translog has been instrumental in studying particular
linguistic phenomena, e.g. the translation of cognates (Malkiel 2006),
metaphors (Rydning Fougner 2002, Sjørup 2008) and idioms (Jakobsen et al.
2007), change of verb position (Sjørup et al. 2009) as well as phenomena of
explicitation (Alves 2003b, Denver 2007, Hjort-Pedersen and Faber
(forthcoming)) and translation directionality (Lorenzo 2002, Jensen and
Pavlović 2009), and the translation of particular types of texts, e.g. translation
of summaries (Rodrigues do Vale 2008) and translation drafting (Jakobsen
2002).
The impact of translation expertise on translation performance has been
researched by Jarvella et al. (2002), Dragsted (2004), Tirkkonen-Condit
(2005), Jakobsen (2005), Martín (2006), Alves and Gonçalves (2007),
Göpferich (2009), and the effect of time pressure by Jensen (1999), Jensen
(2001), Sharmin et al. (2008a). Finally, Translog has also supported the study
of the effect of using translation technology, notably translation memory
systems (Alves and Liparini Campos 2009, Dragsted 2006), and has been used
for the investigation of machine translation post-editing processes (O’Brien
2005, 2006).
4. Baseline
Translog has had an immense impact on translation process research over the
past decade. What has been provided here is a snapshot of the development
and dissemination of the program and the publications drawing on Translog
data. The number of users is still increasing, emphasising the immense and
growing value of the tool. The program is continually being further developed,
most recently with the integration of eye-tracking analysis and new features
such as XML support. Work is being done to design more sophisticated
methods of analysis (Carl and Jakobsen 2009a; Carl and Jakobsen 2009b;
Carl, this volume) which will help us make better sense of the data we obtain
from Translog (and other sources), keeping in mind that “Translog data [...]
have to be interpreted before they can be understood as evidence of specific

mental processes” (Jakobsen 1999: 15).
References1
Alves, F. 2003a. Tradução, cognição e contextualização: triangulando a interface

processo-produto no desempenho de tradutores novatos. D.E.L.T.A. 19: 71-
108.
Alves, F. (ed). 2003b. Triangulating Translation. Perspectives in Process Oriented
Research. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Alves, F. 2005a. Bridging the gap between declarative and procedural knowledge in
the training of translators: meta-reflection under scrutiny. Meta 50(4).
Available at http://www.erudit.org/revue/meta/2005/v50/n4/019861ar.pdf.
Alves, F. 2005b. Ritmo cognitivo, meta-reflexação e experiência: parâmetros de
análise processual no desempenho de tradutores novatos e experientes. In: F.
Alves, C. Magalhães & A. Pagano (eds) Competência em tradução: cognição e
discurso. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG. 109-169.
Alves, F. 2007. Cognitive effort and contextual effect in translation: a relevance-
theoretic approach. Journal of Translation Studies 10 (1): 18-35.
Alves, F. and Liparini Campos, T. 2009. Translation technology in time:
investigating the impact of translation memory systems and time pressure on
types of internal and external support. In S. Göpferich, A. L. Jakobsen & I.
Mees (eds). 191–218.
Alves, F. and Gonçalves, J. L. 2003. A relevance theory approach to the
investigation of inferential processes in translation. In F. Alves (ed.). 3–24.
Alves, F. and Gonçalves, J. L. 2007. Modelling translator’s competence. Relevance
and expertise under scrutiny. In Y. Gambier et al. (eds). 41–55.
Alves, F. and Magalhães, C. 2004. Using small corpora to tap and map the process-
product interface in translation. TradTerm 10 (1): 179 - 211.
Alves, F. and Vale, D. C. 2009. Probing the unit of translation in time: aspects of the
design and development of a web application for storing, annotating, and
querying translation process data. Across Languages and Cultures 10 (2): 251-
273.
Buchweitz, A. and Alves, F. 2006. Cognitive adaptation in translation: an interface
between language direction, time, and recursiveness in target text production.
Letras de Hoje 41 (4): 241-272.
1 List of publications involving Translog data. The list may not be exhaustive, but this is
what we have been able to find. If relevant references have been left out, we apologise
for the omission.
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Part I
METHODOLOGICAL
ISSUES
What can translation research learn from Darwin?
Andrew Chesterman
Abstract
Charles Darwin can be a model for any empirical researcher. This essay
describes his attitudes to his work, the kind of background knowledge he
brought to his major project, his working method, and the way he presented
his ideas in writing. Particular attention is given to Darwin’s way of
arguing, his consideration of possible counter-evidence, and the dialogic
nature of his rhetorical strategy. I also note some problems in Darwin’s
marketing of his theory via translation, and mention some recent research
on how he was motivated by the moral cause of the anti-slavery movement.
1. Introduction
This year, 2009, is not just Arnt Lykke Jakobsen‟s anniversary year. It is
also 200 years since Darwin‟s birth, and 150 years since the publication of
The Origin of Species. It is perhaps a good moment to see what we in
Translation Studies might learn from Darwin‟s achievement. I am not
thinking here of the biological content of his theoretical claims, although
Translation Studies has already shown some interest in applying the notion
of the meme, as a cultural analogy of the gene, in explaining how
translation contributes to cultural evolution (see e.g. Chesterman 1997,
Vermeer 1997). What I wish to describe is Darwin‟s research methodology,
and his way of thinking and writing. I readily confess that my interest in
this subject has been directly inspired by my recent reading of The Origin
of Species. There is much here we can learn from, as translation scholars.
In presenting my response to Darwin‟s book, I also wish to honour
Arnt Lykke Jakobsen‟s achievements as a leading empirical scholar in
Translation Studies. In particular, I am thinking of his emphasis on
methodology in all his work: the way he encourages both qualitative and
quantitative methods, the use of triangulation, and the careful combination
52 Andrew Chesterman
of detailed analysis and a broader vision. Much of what I say here will be
familiar to him! In the conclusion to one of his first Translog articles, he
wrote:
[M]ulti-methodological approaches [are] a challenge we should take up. And an
obvious place to begin would be to try to identify converging observations in
qualitative and quantitative data about the same translation events. By
triangulating on the basis both of qualitative and quantitative data, by testing
hypotheses based on qualitative data against quantitative data, and vice versa, I
believe we can soon begin to make stronger and more informed guesses about
translation. (Jakobsen 1999: 19)
“Converging observations”: the phrase has a good Darwinian ring!
2. Attitudes
Let us start by noting certain aspects of Darwin‟s personality, his attitude to

his work. He was an immensely curious person, interested in a huge variety
of phenomena, both tiny details of pigeons‟ tails or coral reefs and vast
meta-issues posed by philosophy. This curiosity was particularly directed at
facts that did not fit traditional assumptions. The classic example of this
was the prevailing idea that the natural species were fixed, that they had
been created in their present forms and had remained unchanged, part of
the divine plan. Darwin‟s grand project starts by questioning this
widespread assumption.
During the process of his research, he also questioned and tested
many other assumptions which had long been taken for granted. For
instance, it had been assumed that seeds would not survive in salt water,
and so could not propagate themselves by floating from one island to
another. Darwin soaked different kinds of seeds in salt water for weeks to
test this assumption, and proved it false. The soaked seeds germinated even
after several weeks‟ immersion.
He had early realised, as a student, what the essence of scientific
research is. He wrote: “[h]ow odd it is that anyone should not see that all
observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service”
(from his letters, cited in Howard 1982: 91). It is also worth noting that this
early understanding of the way observation is bound up with theoretical
argument came from his early studies in a different field, not biology: his
student training in geology. It was then that he realized, he recorded, “that
What can translation research learn from Darwin? 53
science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may

be drawn from them” (2002: 37). This was the traditional inductive view,
of course; but he would not be a typical inductivist. He was also an
extremely cautious scientist, never claiming more than the evidence would
allow, and always patient enough to check the last details.
In The Origin of Species there are frequent indicators of Darwin‟s
strong emotional response to nature, his feelings of wonder. It seems that
his intellectual thinking was strongly linked to, and motivated by, these
emotions. For instance, in discussing the relative sizes of certain
rudimentary organs he writes (1968: 430): “I have now given the leading
facts with respect to rudimentary organs. In reflecting on them, every one
must be struck with astonishment [...].” First the facts, then the amazement,
then the proposed generalization or explanation.
Darwin‟s deep sense of wonder is also seen in his acknowledgement
of the fundamental mystery shrouding the ultimate causes and purposes of
existence (1968: 24). This attitude entailed both humility and scepticism.
Occasionally he states quite explicitly that he tried to approach a topic “in a
sceptical frame of mind” (e.g. 1968: 244), i.e. unwilling either to accept an
offered claim or to trust initial appearances. He constantly reminds his
readers how little we really know, and admits that he can give no
satisfactory answer to some outstanding questions (e.g. 1968: 313). But he
raises the awkward questions nonetheless, he does not hide them.
He worked extremely hard, totally committed to his research,
somewhat to the neglect of his later social life (despite a large
correspondence). He was fortunate financially, which allowed him the
freedom to follow his interests as a gentleman scientist. He was highly
ambitious, and not a little proud of his achievements, and somewhat self-
absorbed, e.g. in his own health. He was certainly lucky to get the chance
of exploring the world on the Beagle. We know too that Darwin was a
sensitive man, only too aware of the pain which his theory would cause to
traditional Christian believers, not least his wife.
3. Background knowledge
Darwin was a polymath, and had read widely both within and outside his
own field. He drew inspiration from other fields, and was able to see
relations and connections that all fed into his Big Idea. I already mentioned
his early studies of geology. During his five years on the Beagle, he read
the very latest geological theories by Charles Lyell, one of the founders of
modern geology. This work had drawn his attention to the vast age of the
Earth, and the slow processes by which mountains and continents were
formed. Geology had already begun to produce empirical palaeontological
evidence for the idea of slow change. When Darwin came to look at the
question of biological evolution, he was thus already attuned to a very
different time-scale than most of his contemporaries. (A whole chapter of
The Origin of Species deals exclusively with geology.) Darwin had also
read Malthus, and was aware of the economic theories about the
consequences of the struggle for limited resources. He was of course
familiar with previous work on evolution in his own field. – As an
interdiscipline, translation research is increasingly benefiting from input
from outside traditional textual studies. But do we always have adequate
expertise in these other fields?
In one sense, his special gift was to refine and combine a variety of
ideas which were already “in the air”, as it were, in order to produce a new
whole. In other words, he was a great unifier, colligating a huge variety of
facts under a single uniting principle. Salmon (1998) in fact takes Darwin
as an example of what he calls explanation as unification, an alternative to
explanation in terms of causality. – In current Translation Studies there
seems to be some disagreement on the value of seeking grand abstract
principles which might unify a wide range of phenomena. On one hand,
scholars such as Hermans (most recently 2007) have argued for strongly
contextualized case studies; on the other, e.g. Pym (2008) has sought to
link Toury‟s two “laws” of growing standardization and interference under
the single more general principle of risk avoidance. Perhaps both
tendencies are needed; but presumably there should be some connection
between them eventually.
Darwin‟s familiarity with what was going on in other fields was
partly a result of his extensive correspondence. His network of international
contacts was extraordinarily wide, and he exploited this network most
effectively.
In counterbalance to this breadth of background knowledge we also
find a willingness to specialize. Darwin went into some topics in great
depth: pigeons and pigeon-breeding, coral reefs, barnacles, orchids,

earthworms... But in generalizing and offering explanations about
phenomena in these specialized areas he could show relations also with
other fields and thus add to the explanatory adequacy of his arguments.
This kind of comparative, cross-disciplinary perspective made it possible to
formulate more abstract or general principles that applied to more fields
than one. Geological, palaeontological and biological generalizations, for
instance, are shown to merge (e.g. 1968: 343).
4. Method
Darwin‟s working method could be described as a combination of micro

and macro. The great initial stimulus was of course his five years on board
the Beagle, sailing round the world: an amazing opportunity that was
welcomed and exploited to the full. In his autobiography Darwin
recognizes the significance of this voyage.
The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life
and has determined my whole career [...]. I have always felt that I owe to the
voyage the first real training or education of my mind. I was led to attend closely
to several branches of natural history, and thus my powers of observation were
improved, though they were already fairly developed.
The investigation of the geology of all the places visited was far more
important, as reasoning here comes into play. On first examining a new district
nothing can appear more hopeless than the chaos of rocks; but by recording the
stratification and nature of the rocks and fossils at many points, always
reasoning and predicting what will be found elsewhere, light soon begins to
dawn on the district, and the structure of the whole becomes more or less
intelligible. [...]
During some part of the day I wrote in my Journal, and took much pains in
describing carefully and vividly all that I had seen; and this was good practice.
[...]
The above various special studies [e.g. reading Lyell] were, however, of no
importance compared with the habit of energetic industry and of concentrated
attention to whatever I was engaged in, which I then acquired. Everything about
which I thought or read was made to bear directly on what I had seen or was
likely to see; and this habit of mind was continued during the five years of the
voyage. I feel sure that it was this training which has enabled me to do whatever
I have done in science. (2002: 42–43)
This extract also shows Darwin‟s methodical nature: he keeps a research

diary, makes copious notes, reads and compares and reasons, makes
predictions and generalizations and checks them against the next set of
data. In other words, he is not simply collecting data; he is reacting to it all

the time, interrogating it, in a kind of dialogue in a kind of dialogue
between the evidence and his own rational mind. And he works hard, with
“energetic industry and concentrated attention”, learning all the time, and
knowing that he is learning. In his autobiographical recollections, which
were written mainly for the edification of his children, he further stresses
his methodical working methods. He made indexes of every book he read,
maintained an extensive system of notes and references, and so on (2002:
84).
He was also very systematic about his writing process, using a
progression of structural outlines which became gradually thicker (2002:
84). He thought he had a tendency to be unclear, and tried to overcome this
by scribbling down a rough draft fast, which he found helped the
conceptual clarity of the text (2002: 83). At several points, he notes how
useful it is to leave a time gap – sometimes even lasting years! – before
returning to a text for the final revision.
During the voyage Darwin acquired a huge empirical database,
which he never stopped adding to. As he thinks about what he has
observed, he looks for relations between facts, patterns of variation (when
more, when less...), always on the lookout for surprising similarities and
differences (also for misleading similarities, which do not have a common
cause), testing for possible correlations and generalizations that could lead
to a general principle. Here is an example: he is discussing
“compensation”, i.e. cases where if a given feature of an organism is
emphasized, some other feature typically becomes smaller (as e.g. in fruit
with much flesh but small seeds). Darwin concludes:
I suspect [...] that some of the cases of compensation which have been advanced,
and likewise some other facts, may be merged under a more general principle,
namely, that natural selection is continually trying to economize in every part of
the organisation. (1968: 186)
Note: I suspect that some of the cases, and likewise some other facts... First
the caution, then the extension to other data, then the unifying claim.
Another aspect of Darwin‟s method is the attention he pays to
taxonomy. At many points in The Origin of Species he discusses the idea of
classes themselves, the problems of establishing the right categories, the
way classes form a hierarchy, and how this hierarchy can then be explained
in terms of a value principle such as survival or adaptability. The whole

work begins by problematizing a particular category, that of species, and
discusses at length the difficulty of distinguishing between a species and a
variety. Both turn out to be very fuzzy concepts.
In making his claims cautiously, Darwin often implies the
importance of simply showing that something is possible. This is the
weakest kind of claim, weaker than claims about a tendency or about
something universal, for instance. But having shown the possibility, he then
goes on to show how this possibility might have major implications for
larger claims. Here, for example, is an extract from one of the arguments
about instinct. I omit all the content, and just give the structure of the
argument, in four stages:
(i) It will be universally admitted that X

(ii) Under changed conditions...it is at least possible that Y
(iii) And if it can then be shown that Z,
(iv) then “I can see no difficulty in natural selection preserving and
continually accumulating variations of instinct to any extent that may
be possible”. (1968: 236)
I.e. first state the clear facts, then the possible hypothesis, then the crucial
condition which would test the hypothesis, then the implication, if the
possibility becomes a probability of increasing strength. Testing the
hypotheses is of course vital. Darwin himself carried out, and reported in
detail, a large number of often laborious tests to test his points. He wants,
say, to check an idea about the instincts of bees. “Following the example of
Mr Tegetmeier, I separated two combs, and put between them a long, thick,
square strip of wax: the bees instantly began to excavate minute circular
pits in it [...]” (1968: 250).
Darwin‟s caution, and his honesty, are also seen when he openly
states that a given explanation is only a limited one. “It must, however, be
confessed that we cannot understand, excepting on vague hypotheses,
several facts with respect to the sterility of hybrids” (1968: 280).
One of the most striking aspects is the way in which Darwin is so
careful to specify the kind of evidence that would count against his
argument. Sometimes it is as if he is really inviting critics to shoot his
theory down: he exposes the vulnerability of his claims, even specifying

what kind of crucial test or finding would invalidate the theory. This shows
his recognition of the importance of falsifiability: an empirical hypothesis
should be falsifiable. Here are some examples. Discussing the idea held by
some naturalists, that many organic structures “have been created for
beauty in the eyes of man, or for mere variety”, Darwin acknowledges:
“[t]his doctrine, if true, would be absolutely fatal to my theory” (1968:
227). Or again, thinking about the possibility of the sudden appearance of
whole groups of allied species: “[i]f numerous species, belonging to the
same genera or families, have really started into life all at once, the fact
would be fatal to the theory of descent with slow modification through
natural selection” (1968: 309). And again, pondering the evolution of the
eye, which had often been given as a powerful example of precisely the
position Darwin is arguing against: “[i]f it could be demonstrated that any
complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by
numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely
break down” (1968: 219).
Objections are anticipated, not concealed. Furthermore, they are not
presented in a weak form, as straw men, but as strongly as possible.
Difficulties are placed openly on the table. At one point he selects for
discussion “the three classes of facts [that present] the greatest amount of
difficulty...” (1968: 352). A whole chapter (VI) is given to “Difficulties on
theory”. Here, Darwin freely admits his ignorance of many relevant facts;
he does his best to state clearly the main objections to his theory that could
be imagined, and deals with them carefully.
Some of them [these difficulties] are so grave that to this day I can never reflect
on them without being staggered; but, to the best of my judgment, the greater
number are only apparent, and those that are real are not, I think, fatal to my
theory. (1968: 205)
And again:
That many and grave objections may be advanced against the theory of descent
with modification through natural selection, I do not deny. I have endeavoured
to give them their full force. (1968: 435)
There is humility here, as well as confidence. Darwin positively relishes

criticism.
I had, also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a
published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was
opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at
once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more
apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones. (2002: 75)
– Note: anything that opposed his theory, not anything that supported it!
One of the reasons for his admiration of the geologist Lyell was that
whenever Darwin made some remark to him, “[h]e would advance all
possible objections to my suggestion, and even after these were exhausted
would long remain dubious” (2002: 58). Another colleague is criticized for
“his excessive fear of ever making a mistake” (2002: 60). Darwin writes: “I
have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free, so as to give up any
hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot help forming one on
every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it” (2002: 86).
(Do we in Translation Studies spend too little time exposing our hypotheses
and arguments to counter-evidence?)
Darwin has a Popperian attitude towards errors: they must be
acknowledged, and are there to be learned from. In Notebook M (one of his
vital research diaries, this one was for thoughts on “Metaphysics with
Morals & Speculations on Expression”) he writes in 1838: “Probably some
error in the argument here. Should be grateful if pointed out” (cited in
Padel 2009: 52). At one point in his recollections, he recalls how one of his
geological papers had been “a great failure” because he had falsely
assumed that no other explanation was possible for a particular
phenomenon than the one he proposed, which must therefore be correct.
Later research had brought a better explanation, however. Darwin notes:
“my error has been a good lesson to me never to trust in science to the
principle of exclusion” (2002: 48). He is aware of the gaps in his own
research skills, too: he knows he is bad at drawing and anatomical
dissection.
There is likewise humility in Darwin‟s attitude of respectful
disagreement towards geologists who supported the idea of immutable
species. “I feel how rash it is to differ from these great authorities, to
whom, with others, we owe all our knowledge” (1968: 316). But...
I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept,
and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume
alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there
a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few
lines. (1968: 316)
(Should we be more careful about making claims about translation

universals?) We have noted Darwin‟s tentative claims about proposing
possible explanations, rather than ultimate truths. One reason for this
tentativeness is of course Darwin‟s awareness of the implications of his
theory, of the way it will shake the prevailing consensus concerning the
origins of life in general and of homo sapiens in particular.
The Origin of Species is one long argument. But it is made up of
smaller arguments, of different kinds, and this variety is also evident in
Darwin‟s autobiographical writings about his research method. Sometimes
the argument is purely inductive, proceeding from facts to generalizations.
During the early stages of the big project, Darwin says he collected data
without a clear idea of where he was going. “I worked on true Baconian
principles, and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale”
(2002: 72). When his curiosity about the origin of species had been
aroused, a process of imaginative speculation followed, leading to the main
hypothesis and the predictions that could be derived from it, and the testing
of the hypothesis. – This is at least the account he gives himself. We might
suspect that the early collection of facts was scarcely random, however, and
that he most likely had an initial sketch of the hypothesis quite early (see
further below).
At other times Darwin makes use of a deductive approach. On how
he came up with his theory about the formation of coral reefs, he writes that
he had thought of the hypothesis before he had ever actually seen a coral
reef; all he needed to do then was to verify it by observation (2002: 57). –
Perhaps this example shows something about the multiple possible sources
of hypotheses: some emerge from data, others from thought, and some
from flashes of insight. “I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in
my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me” (2002: 73).
And we often see clear cases of abductive reasoning. There are some
strange or surprising facts, whose strangeness is then accounted for by an
explanation. “How simply are these facts explained on the view [that...X]”
(1968: 145). The key phenomenon of natural selection is not observed
directly, but is inferred by arguing from observations and a small number
of crucial self-evident generalizations: (a) there is variation, b) this
variation is to some extent hereditary, c) organisms multiply at a rate that

exceeds the available resources (Malthus), so many must die.
Occasionally, there is pure speculation. Darwin‟s hypothesis of
Pangenesis, purporting to account for the mechanism of heredity (in the age
before genetics, note), has long been refuted. Darwin recalls:
An unverified hypothesis is of little or no value. But if anyone should hereafter
be led to make observations by which some such hypothesis could be
established, I shall have done good service, as an astonishing number of isolated
facts can thus be connected together and rendered intelligible. (2002: 79)
In other words: here is an idea which someone might be able to

operationalize and test one day. That too is a contribution.
– Perhaps there is something to be learned from this kind of eclectic
argumentative repertoire. Perhaps we should aim for more flexibility, not
just in research method but also in mode of argument.
5. Rhetoric
Let us now pick out some other salient features of Darwin‟s way of
presenting his ideas, in terms of communicating with his readers. Some of
these may be related to the fact that The Origin of Species was a much
shortened version of Darwin‟s original manuscript, and was prepared rather
hastily for publication after he had read Wallace‟s paper proposing a similar
theory. So Darwin needed to get his ideas out in the public arena quickly, or
risk being overtaken.
He writes for the general intelligent layman, not exclusively for an
elite specialist readership. There are few technical terms, and they are
carefully explained; and there is almost no formalization. The Big Idea
comes early, but is gently introduced by a chapter on the kind of normal
breeding and domestication carried out by farmers, pigeon-fanciers or
florists, as they seek to maximize certain characteristics of an organism.
This will be familiar stuff to his readers. The theme then shifts from
breeding by human agents to breeding by natural selection; and away we
go.
Part of his readability stems from his use of analogies and similes –
like the analogy between domestic breeding and natural selection. Breeds
themselves are compared to dialects (1968: 97): neither can be said to have
a clear origin, since both emerge slowly from populations containing

variation. And elsewhere: “[r]udimentary organs may be compared with the
letters in a word, still retained in the spelling, but become useless in the
pronunciation, but which serve as a clue in seeking for its derivation”
(1968: 432).
The book starts with a clear opening question: where do species
come from? This question is a big one, a significant one, and Darwin
knows this. It has been called, he writes, “that mystery of mysteries” (1968:
65). The whole issue is polemical, with vast repercussions that extend far
beyond biology. So the macro-level rhetorical structure is simply: question
→ answer.
There are in fact two possible answers: the prevailing one, i.e. that
species are permanent and unchanging essences, and Darwin‟s evolutionary
hypothesis. This opposition allows Darwin to structure many parts of his
argument as a battle between two alternatives, which gives rhetorical
strength and cohesion. Chapter X starts thus:
Let us now see whether the several facts and rules relating to the geological
succession of organic beings, better accord with the common view of the
immutability of species, or with that of their slow and gradual modification,
through descent and natural selection. (1968: 317)
He is not only arguing for a given position, then, but also against an
opposing one. The rhetorical strategy throughout the text is that of a
dialogue or debate, with opponents sometimes explicitly present,
sometimes only implicit. (Are we sometimes too monologic, as if talking to
ourselves?)
Darwin gets purely conceptual problems out of the way early. Many
of the key concepts he uses have no adequate definition, he admits.
Naturalists disagree about how to define „species‟ or „subspecies‟ or
„variety‟, and it has not proved possible to state where the borderline
between them might run. Yet “every naturalist knows vaguely what he
means when he speaks of a species” (1968: 101). This is enough. Darwin is
quite happy to work with poorly defined concepts. (After all, one might
say, most definitions too evolve, they are rarely born perfect!) But Darwin
is aware of the crucial criteria that gradually refine definitions: it is a
question of the degree of variation within a given category (1968: 106–
108). Deciding that a given degree of variation marks the range within a
category, as opposed to some greater degree which marks a divide between

categories – this is merely an operational decision. Nature is naturally
fuzzy. (A later naturalist, Richard Dawkins, has given a name to the
unfortunate human tendency to seek black-and-white borders where none
exist: he calls it “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind” (2004: 252): our
mind evidently finds it hard to recognize continua.) – Translation scholars
will recall our interminable debates on definitions of translation, culture
and so on. As has often been observed, a (lingua) culture can be compared
memetically to a species, with fuzzy borders marked by various degrees of
need for translation.
There are other examples of Darwin‟s willingness to work with
poorly defined concepts. At the opening of the chapter on instinct, he
writes candidly: “I will not attempt any definition of instinct” (1968: 234).
We all know what we mean when we say that it is instinct that causes the
cuckoo to lay her egg in another bird‟s nest. But we cannot separate instinct
absolutely from reason, nor from habit. And some instincts are stronger
than others, so there is endless variation anyway. Never mind; we proceed
to investigate the wonderful instinctual behaviour of bees...
Ever the gentleman, Darwin treats other naturalists politely, even
when he disagrees with them. Positive epithets abound: the “celebrated
geologist and naturalist” (1968: 57); so-and-so “has ably given the
arguments...” (57); “an excellent pamphlet” (61). Where there is
disagreement, the tone is reserved. For instance: “[Mr X] would, I presume,
say that [Y]; but this assumption seems to me to be no explanation, for it
leaves [facts Z] untouched and unexplained” (67).
One stylistic feature which nowadays may seem slightly archaic is
Darwin‟s prolific use of the first person. His subjective presence in the text
is most marked, not only in the minute descriptions of his own experiments
but also in the argumentative sections. This presence is also an emotional
one. “How strange are these facts!” (1968: 145) The reader at no point
forgets that this text is the work of an individual person striving to
understand something.
Each chapter ends with a helpful summary.
6. A note on marketing
It‟s not enough to have good ideas. You also have to sell them, to market
them. In Darwin‟s case, some of the marketing was easy. The first and
second editions of The Origin of Species sold out rapidly. It is of interest to
translation scholars to note, however, that the business of organizing
translations into other major languages was sometimes problematic. On
Darwin‟s initiative, the first translation appeared a year later (1860) in
German. But there were many problems with the first French translation,
discussed in a fascinating article by Brisset (2002).
After problems finding a translator, the work had been entrusted to
Clémence Royer, a largely self-educated and supremely self-confident
intellectual lady who agreed so strongly with Darwin‟s views that she
produced a French version that was strongly coloured by her own
supportive position, with abundant footnotes explaining the original,
defining terms, and with critical notes on Darwin‟s argument, including
references to her own research. Of particular interest is the observation (by
Miles 1989, cited by Brisset) that many stylistic changes were evidently
motivated by the translator‟s wish to domesticate Darwin‟s mode of
argument in accordance with the French tradition of scientific writing,
which at that time was more positivist, more inductive, than the British one.
She therefore transformed many of Darwin‟s hypothetical conjectures into
firm facts and thus changed the form of some of his arguments. Moreover,
she also extended Darwin‟s argument into the social sphere – something
that Darwin had carefully avoided in this book. After his first surprise at
the translator‟s audacity, Darwin was horrified by the translation, and the
following years saw an increasingly frustrating correspondence between
him and the French publisher. That “verdammte Mlle Royer whose errors
are endless” (letter to Henrietta Darwin, June 1865, cited in Brisset 2002:
195) cast a long shadow over the years of Darwin‟s illness as he struggled
with revisions of later editions. – Moral: it is good that important works are
translated, but woe betide the scholar if the translator tries to take over the
responsibility of the original author! In this case, the translator‟s
manipulation was not welcome. Evidently, there should have been much
closer control during the translating process, as in the case of the German
translator, who had been in regular contact with Darwin. Later editions had
a different French translator and publisher.
7. A note on motivation
Apart from Darwin‟s purely scientific ambition, there is another aspect of

his motivation that deserves mention. His relatives, the Wedgwoods, were
active in the anti-slavery movement, and his diaries record his horrified
reactions on seeing how slaves were treated in the countries he visited on
the Beagle. He had been taught taxidermy by an ex-slave in Edinburgh. It
has recently been suggested (Desmond and Moore 2009) that Darwin‟s
whole project was motivated by his abolitionist convictions: his need to
show that all human beings, regardless of colour or race, shared the same
evolutionary roots and were thus related. This motivation might be called
Darwin‟s telos (Chesterman and Baker 2008): the kind of ultimate personal
goal driving him on, the ethical force behind the scientific work.
If Desmond and Moore are right, there are interesting implications to
be drawn about his basic research method, as they point out. Whereas
Darwin often appears to be letting the facts speak for themselves, he would
be actually seeking to promote an ethically motivated hypothesis.
Whatever the case may be, it is good to interrogate ourselves from
time to time about our ultimate scholarly motivations, beyond the
immediate skopoi of particular actions. And an anniversary is a good
moment for such introspection...
References
Brisset, A. 2002. Clémence Royer, ou Darwin en colère. In J. Delisle (ed.).

Portraits de traductrices. Ottawa: Presses Universitaires d‟Ottawa. 173–
203.
Chesterman, A. 1997. Memes of Translation. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Chesterman, A., and Baker, M. 2008. Ethics of renarration. Cultus 1(1): 10–33.
Darwin, C. [1859] 1968. The Origin of Species. London: Penguin Books.
Darwin, C. 2002. Autobiographies. London: Penguin Books.
Dawkins, R. 2004. The Ancestor’s Tale. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Desmond, A. & Moore, J. 2009. Darwin’s Sacred Cause. London: Allen Lane.
Hermans, T. 2007. The Conference of the Tongues. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Howard, J. 1982. Darwin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jakobsen, A.L. 1999. Logging target text production with Translog. In G. Hansen
(ed.). Probing the Process in Translation: Methods and Results.
(Copenhagen Studies in Language 24) Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur. 9–
20.
Miles, S.J. 1989. Clémence Royau et De l’origine des espèces: traductrice ou
traîtresse? Revue de Synthèse 4: 61-83.
Padel, Ruth 2009. Darwin. A Life in Poems. London: Chatto & Windus.
Pym, A. 2008. On Toury‟s laws of how translators translate. In A. Pym, M.
Shlesinger and D. Simeoni (eds). Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies.
Amsterdam: Benjamins. 311–328.
Salmon, W.C. 1998. Causality and Explanation. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Vermeer, H.J. 1997. Translation and the „Meme‟. Target 9(1): 155–166.
Eye to IS: on qualitative research in interpreting studies
Franz Pöchhacker
Abstract
With reference to some basic methodological choices and underlying epis-

temological positions, this paper discusses the status of qualitative research
in interpreting studies to date and examines the literature for evidence of a
trend toward “going qualitative”.
Prolog
Translation process research using keystroke logging and more advanced

technologies, such as the eye tracking alluded to in my title, is the line of
work most closely associated with the scholar celebrated in this volume, to
the extent that Translog might be Arnt Jakobsen’s middle name. His much
broader range of expertise notwithstanding, this makes it hard to engage
with or even add to his inspiring work for someone with a rather narrow
focus on interpreting. Admittedly, interpreting research has traditionally
shown an overriding concern with cognitive processes, and relied on
experimental designs for their study. This would give translation and
interpreting researchers a good stretch of shared process-oriented ground
on which to interact, and Arnt and his associates have indeed explored that
ground (e.g. Jakobsen et al. 2007; cf. also Dragsted & Hansen 2007). And
yet, my intention here is to explore differences and alternative perspectives
rather than common ground, at a broadly methodological rather than an
empirical level, concentrating on interpreting rather than translation
research – in short, opting for “Methodolog” over Trans-log. This puts my
contribution at some remove from the core concerns of translation process
research, but I still hope that it may be worthwhile here to put an eye to
interpreting studies (IS) and to the role of qualitative research within that
field.
68 Franz Pöchhacker
1. Method and data in early IS
In the formative years of interpreting research, essentially in the 1960s and

1970s, choosing a research method would not have been an issue. Inter-
preting as a novel object of study was approached by representatives of
such disciplines as psycholinguistics and experimental psychology (e.g.
Gerver 1969; Barik 1975), who would naturally apply the proven working
methods of their respective fields. Experimental psychology, in particular,
left a lasting imprint on the methodological orientation of research on (con-
ference) interpreting, with David Gerver appearing as a perfect role model
whose pioneering experiments (c. 1970) inspired much empirical work in
the Trieste-led “Renaissance” of interpreting research (Gile 1994) which
followed the dominance of the Paris School. Except in the latter, the crucial
role of the experimental method seemed beyond doubt, and with it the
reliance on quantitative (e.g. time lag or pause measurements) or
quantifiable data. The debate, if any, did not center on the nature of the data
– in the sense of the distinction between quantitative vs. qualitative made in
this paper – but on the basic approach to scientific research.
1.1 Scientific research
The debate over valid scientific methods and findings in interpreting re-
search can be traced back at least to the early 1970s, when Henri Barik
disseminated his work in translation journals such as Babel and Meta, and
representatives of the interpreting profession, with some reason, showed
little appreciation for the findings from his experiments. Ecological valid-
ity, though not referred to as such at the time, was the bone of contention,
and the field came to split into controlled experimenters, on the one hand,
and champions of studying authentic data from real-life professional
practice, on the other. “Gerver vs. Seleskovitch” could be shorthand for the
methodological divide, though the two, appearing side by side in Richard
Brislin’s (1976) anthology, could easily be shown to share a profound
interest in the cognitive process of interpreting in either mode.
In the late 1980s, when the budding field entered the “Trieste era”,
the enduring distinction between experimental and authentic data was
overlaid by a more fundamental division, that is, “scientific research vs.
personal theories”, as coined by Daniel Gile (1990). Gile’s charge against
On qualitative research in IS 69
the “defensiveness, and even aggressiveness towards scientific research”

(1990: 32) allegedly displayed by the group around Seleskovitch at ESIT
(Ecole Supérieure d'Interprètes et de Traducteurs, Paris) foregrounded
scientific standards over a given methodological approach. Gile
(dis)qualified much of the literature on interpreting as generated by the
Paris School as “unscientific”, citing a number of unsubstantiated claims in
Seleskovitch’s (1975) published doctoral dissertation.
Though Gile went on to offer a careful analysis of the potential and
limitations of empirical research and came down in favor of observational
rather than experimental research, he devoted little attention to the Paris
School’s methodological approach(es) as such. This is a blind spot I
suggest is worth filling, as the ESIT Group’s way of dealing with data
points to some key issues associated with qualitative research.
1.2 Dealing with data
Though branded as speculative theorizers, members of the Paris School

actually deserve credit for pioneering the study of conference interpreting
based on authentic corpora. Marianne Lederer, in particular, who presented
a short transcript-based analysis at the 1977 Venice Symposium, used the
time-aligned presentation of a one-hour French–German simultaneous
interpreting (SI) corpus as an empirical underpinning to her doctoral work.
Notwithstanding the shortcomings in her method (cf. Pöchhacker 1994: 21)
and the regrettable blending of real-life data with a “studio” version, hers is
a sizeable body of interpretation, used for systematic time lag measure-
ments as well as the analysis of selected passages. Gile (1990: 29) takes
issue with the latter, citing Stenzl’s (1983: 47) criticism that Lederer “gives
little information that is based on the corpus as a whole”, making it
“impossible to assess the representativeness of the passages she discusses”.
What is at stake here is not the quality of the data as such or of the findings
derived from them (with regard to components in Lederer’s process model
of SI), but the value of individual extracts (“samples”) in relation to the
total. While no explicit demand is made for corpus-wide quantification, the
quantitative research logic underlying this criticism of Lederer’s corpus
analysis is reflected in the reference to “representativeness”.
Similar remarks could be made about the (experimental) data gen-

erated and discussed (selectively) by Seleskovitch (1975), or the corpus
compiled – and underexploited – by Karla Déjean Le Féal (1978), who was
among the first to grapple with the complex issue of prosodic features in
interpreted speech. However, my purpose here is neither to review nor to
reify these early studies by researchers at ESIT, but merely to use their
controversial assessment as the manifestation of a much more profound –
and largely unspecified – tension during a crucial phase in the development
of IS. That tension was apparently not, or not only, between empirical
(“scientific”) and non-empirical research (“theorizing”), but between dif-
ferent ways of using empirical data, whether generated experimentally or
collected in the field.
1.3 Paradigms
The controversy over the appropriate way(s) of dealing with empirical data
in research on conference interpreting found its clearest expression in
Barbara Moser-Mercer’s (1994) essay on the division of the field into a
“liberal arts community”, on the one hand, and a “natural science para-
digm”, on the other. What is interesting here about this much-discussed
manifesto for the scientific method in interpreting research are the criteria
by which the two camps are distinguished, namely, logical precision and
quantification. The liberal arts community is said to be less logically
rigorous, and the natural science camp bent on quantification. While
“general theorizing” is mentioned only in connection with the liberal arts
group, either would presumably be seen as engaged in theory-building and
involve a certain amount, or type, of logic.
This is where one might expect the division to be explained with
reference to such notions as deduction vs. induction, or abductive reasoning
as a “less logical” alternative, but this is not the case. Indeed, the
fundamental issue that I would like to highlight in this debate remains
unaddressed. A small pointer to it may be identified in Gile’s paper when
he refers to the fundamental role of “facts”, which come in two forms
(1990: 29): “facts collected through systematic observation” and “facts en-
countered in the daily, personal and subjective experience of the inter-
preter”. Though I realize I am stretching this quote beyond the author’s
original intention, its perfect fit to introduce the core issues of ontology and
epistemology seems too hard to resist: facts, reality, reliable knowledge –
do they “exist”? Are they accessible? And if so, how? Oppositions such as
“objective facts” vs. subjective understanding; (scientific) knowledge vs.
beliefs; and systematic theory vs. individual experience can be seen as
reflecting different worldviews on how to gain knowledge by “doing
science”. And yet, the term “epistemology” is rarely encountered in the
interpreting literature. The debate over paradigms recalled above does
address key issues in the philosophy of science, but it hardly engages
directly with the nature of epistemological positions. The following
paragraphs will therefore introduce some of the themes relevant to the
subsequent discussion of qualitative research in IS.
2. Notes on epistemology
For lack of space – and expertise – to give an overview of epistemology

since the time of the Greek philosophers, I will reduce this complex topic
to a few basic oppositions that serve to illustrate the main point, that is, the
plurality of possible viewpoints.
2.1 In there vs. out there
In the human quest for knowledge, the central status of ideas going back to
Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy is beyond doubt. And so is, at least for
several centuries now, the value of engaging with empirically accessible
phenomena. Pure rationalism, uncoupled from sensory experience, is of
limited value in gaining knowledge about the world, and equally futile
would be the attempt to limit what can be known to what can be captured in
measurements. The latter positivist stance is nevertheless what has tradi-
tionally been associated with the natural sciences, which are increasingly
dominant also in the study of human beings and their pursuits.
The broadly antithetical positions of rationalism and positivism, or
empiricism, have major implications for the way a researcher would treat
data, if at all. Most importantly, this concerns the relationship between the
observer and the object of study: Is there a reality “out there”, independent
of the person(s) wishing to study it? Or is it only an appearance or re-
presentation of some reality that is construed by the scholarly mind (“in

there”)? For the individual wishing to engage with empirically accessible
phenomena, these two viewpoints represent a basic choice between (neo-)
positivism, on the one hand, and (some version of) constructivism, on the
other. For research communities as a whole, i.e. on the level of the
philosophy of science, they pose the question as to the nature of a given
discipline. This is particularly relevant here against the background of the
liberal-arts vs. natural-science debate mentioned above, which has been
given a new lease on life for Translation Studies as a whole in the
distinction between LAP and ESP, that is, the liberal arts and the empirical
science paradigm (e.g. Gile 2009: 152). Again, the core issue is epistemo-
logical, pointing to different routes to (scientific) knowledge.
2.2 Measuring and making sense
As interpreting is a human activity open to sensory experience, IS would

obviously be classified as an empirical discipline. But since the task is
understanding and communicating language-based meaning to others
(“making sense”), IS can equally be seen as a paradigm case of the
humanities. In some schemes, the latter also include fields such as anthro-
pology and communication studies; in others, the study of communicative
interaction would be regarded as a mainstay of sociology and thus part of
the social sciences. Such a multiple characterization of interpreting re-
search, more so than a forced choice between either liberal arts or empirical
science, helps understand why it might be so difficult within IS to agree on
a fixed position along the spectrum between objective and subjective, or
between unbiased data and interpretations. What is commonly accepted at
least is the essentially postpositivist principle that data are not there as a
“given”, but are ultimately “taken” by the analyst with a particular idea and
purpose in mind (cf. Chesterman & Arrojo 2000: 152).
Related to well-known frameworks in the philosophy of science, the
neopositivist and constructivist stances could be aligned, respectively, with
critical rationalism (essentially associated with the work of Karl Popper)
and hermeneutics, as shaped by the German philosopher Hans-Georg
Gadamer. The former, guiding the researcher to build better theories by
testing theory-driven and carefully operationalized hypotheses against ob-
servational or experimental data, is widely regarded now as characterizing

the standard scientific method, in which notions like variables, measure-
ments and hence quantification as well as validity and reliability are of
crucial concern (cf. also Massaro & Shlesinger 1997: 18). The hermeneutic
approach, on the other hand, explains understanding – e.g. in interpreting a
literary, historical or religious text – as a subjective process in which the
interpreter’s prior knowledge (“horizon”) fuses with fresh perceptual input.
The latter has been viewed as the quintessential method of the humanities,
but it would be reductionist to equate these positions with the two-way split
into empirical sciences and humanities. As long as we can agree that a text
(or speech) is a phenomenon accessible to empirical study, understanding
texts and doing empirical research should not be incompatible. Indeed, as I
am about to argue, the two are inseparable, especially in the framework of
qualitative research.
3. Qualitative data and research
While knowledge is the ultimate goal of scientific endeavor, its building

blocks involve relevant information about the phenomena under study, that
is, data. Data represent something about an object and come in many
different forms, from simple observation-based counts to images and verbal
descriptions of various attributes. One basic distinction is between
numerical data (attributes expressed in numbers) and nonnumerical data,
such as texts. The former lend themselves most immediately to quantifica-
tion; the latter essentially require interpretation.
3.1 Text as data
Information expressed in language, or texts, constitutes a particularly

complex form of data that is of pivotal concern to many disciplines, from
archeology and bibliometrics to media and translation studies. In some of
these fields, texts or verbal data are not only representations of the object
under study but constitute the object itself. At any rate, this makes inter-
pretation, that is, the hermeneutic process of making sense, an integral part
of the scientific process. Which leads right back to the fundamental
epistemological issue of objective data independent of the analyst vs.

interpretations shaped by the researcher.
The nature of the data, however, does not in itself condition a certain
epistemological stance. A researcher measuring oxygen content in an inter-
preting booth may feel less of a need to be aware of subjective bias than,
say, an analyst identifying syntactic strategies in an interpreter’s rendition,
but either may opt for a constructivist epistemology, or an empiricist one,
for that matter. More so than the distinction between quantitative and
qualitative data, it is the premises and values driving the research process
that are likely to affect the choice of scientific approach and methodology.
Trying to see and understand the world through informants’ eyes, for
instance, may be preferred to working deductively from the pre-existing
theories the researcher is familiar with. This is how the standard scientific
method (in the sense of Popperian hypothesis testing) came to be subverted
in a number of disciplines in the early part of the twentieth century.
3.2 Going qualitative
Notwithstanding the many advances of modern civilization built on the

consistent application of standard scientific procedures, the idea that one
method can fit all intellectual needs is clearly doubtful and would make a
swing of the pendulum, or at least a major shift, rather likely. This is what
seems to have occurred in the course of the twentieth century, beginning in
fields such as anthropology and sociology. In the latter it is associated with
the work of the “Chicago school” on human group life; in the former with
the ethnographic fieldwork of Malinowski and Mead (cf. Denzin & Lincoln
2000: 1). Roughly speaking, the shift was from objectivist (detached,
systematic) procedures, i.e. the projection of theories beyond the individual
case, toward a reflexive (subjectivity-conscious) attitude in searching for
“idiographic” and contextualized explanations. In methodological terms,
this translated into a preference for unstructured participant observation and
interviews over controlled experimenting or sample-based surveys. Overall,
the purpose was to connect more immediately with human experience, of
individuals as well as groups, while relinquishing the strict separation
between researcher and research participant.
As summarized by Creswell (1994: 4f.), the qualitative paradigm,

also referred to as the constructivist, naturalistic and interpretative
approach, is characterized by the ontological assumption that “reality is
subjective and multiple” and that the researcher, unavoidably value-laden
and biased, interacts with what, or who, is being studied. In Denzin &
Lincoln’s (2000: 8) very similar words,
Qualitative researchers stress the socially constructed nature of reality, the
intimate relationship between the researcher and what is studied, and the
situational constraints that shape inquiry. Such researchers emphasize the value-
laden nature of inquiry. They seek answers to questions that stress how social
experience is created and given meaning.
Qualitative research, in this light, is neither a methodology nor only a

matter of the type of data used but an attitude, underpinned by a
constructivist (hermeneutic, pluralistic) epistemology and distinctly
sensitive to context, self and Other.
4. Qualitative research in IS
Having reviewed the early decades of IS and identified a neglect of episte-

mological issues even in the face of a bitter debate over research para-
digms, the previous sections were designed to provide some foundations
for addressing the actual topic of this paper, that is, the role of qualitative
research in interpreting studies. I will do so now by first reflecting on a few
roots in earlier decades before examining the literature for evidence of a
trend toward more qualitative research.
4.1 Interpretive theory (of knowledge)?
In various passages of this essay, the terms “interpreter” and “interpreta-

tion” were used in the hermeneutic sense without any effort at resolving
their potential ambiguity. Making sense of a phenomenon (such as a text or
set of data) thus appeared similar to the communicative and cognitive pro-
cessing task we classify as a form of translational activity. That analogy
was in fact welcome, as in the quote from Gile (1990: 29) speaking of
“facts encountered in the daily, personal and subjective experience of the
interpreter”. Gile of course meant to distinguish “subjective facts” (beliefs)
from objective ones gathered by a detached researcher working according
to systematic procedures. In contrast to such a researcher, the “interpreter”,

in either sense, would be an individual bringing subjective prior knowledge
to bear on input (source) data perceived in a particular context. It was this
sense-making process that Seleskovitch sought to elucidate by her “inter-
pretive theory” (IT) of translation, and my question, posed by the super-
ficial ambiguity, is whether Seleskovitch could be said to have espoused a
corresponding interpretive theory of knowledge.
As regards the epistemological level as such, Seleskovitch’s œuvre
probably is not explicit enough to answer this question. Among her
associates, however, Mariano García-Landa, who studied philosophy of
language in Germany in the 1950s, did indeed very explicitly make the
connection with a hermeneutic epistemology. In opposition to the classical
scientific model of the natural sciences, García-Landa (1995) asserts that
the epistemological model for all the social sciences (I am afraid translation
theory is a social science because it deals with social agents doing things in
social fields) … has to contemplate a human being in front of another human
being and not in front of a “natural process”. That model, as I see it, presents a
subject of perception, (who is also a scientist), contemplating, not a “natural
process” but a “social process,” that is to say, a process in which there are
human beings doing things in the presence of other human beings (1995: 396).
Research on interpreting thus amounts to human beings trying to make

sense of what other human beings are doing, and García-Landa, who refers
to philosophers such as Schleiermacher, Dilthey and Gadamer, is quite
clear that “all interpretation is made by an interpreter rooted or located in a
personal, social and historical situation or context” (1995: 390).
At least as represented here by García-Landa, the research done at
ESIT on the basis of observing translational practice could be characterized
as “interpret(at)ive”, if not qualitative research. The interest in describing
individual cases rather than representative samples; the prioritizing of
naturalistic data over the control of variables; the social relation between
researcher and participants; the holistic rather than reductionist view of the
object; and the preference for involvement and “getting close” to the object
rather than claiming objectivity and detachment could all be noted as
characteristic of qualitative research. One could even perceive an analogy
to Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss 1967) in the way Seleskovitch
described the scientific approach of traductologie at ESIT: “il s’agit de
construire une science de la traduction fondée sur l’observation de

l’exercice de la traduction par les traducteurs” (1981: 304).
On the other hand – and quite aside from García-Landa’s (1995: 392)
allegation that “Seleskovitch was not interested in theories but in practical
matters” – the Paris School approach to interpreting research clearly failed
to live up to the principles of qualitative research in several ways. Most
critically, it lacked the self-reflective and pluralistic attitude required in
qualitative research to account for the inherent subjectivity and contingency
of inquiry. It also showed little interest in adopting incremental analytical
methods along the lines of coding, constant comparison and theoretical
sampling. Crucially perhaps for attracting the subsequent charge of
“masters of truth”, qualitative data analysis in the ESIT tradition failed to
engage with “deviant” (contradictory, exceptional) cases. The resulting
theory would therefore tend toward idealization rather than descriptive
power, as in the decision to limit interpreting to the rendering of extem-
poraneous speech.
In summary, while the IT Paradigm of interpreting studies (Pöch-
hacker 2004: 68) in some senses approximates the interpretative approach
to inquiry, not least by rejecting natural-science approaches as ill-suited to
human sense-making processes and opting for field data from authentic
contexts, it cannot be regarded as a proto-paradigm of qualitative research.
Allowing for subjectivity in interpreting naturalistic data constituted a bold
departure at the time, but a program of data-driven (inductive) theory
generation never really took shape.
4.2 Interpreting (and) qualitative data
At either end of the developmental stage dominated by the Paris School or

IT Paradigm, the search for qualitative approaches in interpreting research
looks rather futile. As mentioned in an earlier section, early studies in the
1960s and 1970s were done in the “psycho-statistical paradigm” (Robson
1993: 45) of experimental hypothesis testing, and the same applies to work
during the “Renaissance” of interpreting research until well into the 1990s.
Of course the data generated in most experimental studies (with the
exception of those in the neurolinguistic paradigm) would be “texts”, but
these were not interpreted as such but as “verbal protocols” for scoring and
quantification – even though Barik (1975), rather unusually, speaks

explicitly of “qualitative data”. This also applies to the study by Cokely
(1992) based on fieldwork data from a conference with sign language
interpreting.
Nevertheless, discourse data from real-life interpreter-mediated
events did arrive on the scene (or return to it) in the early 1990s. Whereas
my own case study of a three-day technical conference (Pöchhacker 1994)
still sought rigor in corpus-wide quantification though nevertheless
venturing into some qualitative analysis, the groundbreaking work of
Cecilia Wadensjö (1992) supplied a paradigm case of qualitative discourse
analysis that has since been followed in numerous studies on interpreting in
community-based settings (e.g. Pöchhacker & Shlesinger 2007).
As a complement to such discourse-based studies, but also as a form
of qualitative inquiry in its own right, interpreting practices have been
investigated using an ethnographic approach; Claudia Angelelli’s (2004)
work on medical interpreting being among the prime examples.
Aside from participant observation and document/corpus analysis as
used in ethnographic studies, interviews are probably the most likely source
of qualitative data and hence prone to a qualitative research approach. Until
the end of the twentieth century, however, very few interview-based studies
on interpreting and interpreters were carried out. One of the noteworthy
examples is the pioneering survey among first-generation conference inter-
preters in Geneva by Jesús Sanz (1930), who interviewed 20 practitioners
to learn about their work practices and abilities. The latter topic was
revisited only some six decades later in Erich Feldweg’s (1996) survey
among AIIC members in Germany. Significantly, Feldweg reported the
(stenographically recorded) interviews with his sample of 39 fellow
conference interpreters without an eye to quantification. While grouping
responses into thematic patterns, Feldweg made sure to give his partici-
pants a voice (by quoting extensive excerpts from the responses), and
unabashedly acknowledged his professional and personal ties with many of
the respondents.
Feldweg’s (1996) interview study among German conference inter-
preters thus largely qualifies as a piece of qualitative research in IS, not
least because the (semistructured) interviews are treated as a full-fledged
inquiry rather than a preparatory stage in developing the instrument for a
quantitative survey. The latter would correspond to the traditional view of

qualitative research and its place in scientific inquiry, namely as “prelimi-
nary, exploratory, groundbreaking work for getting surveys started” (Glaser
& Strauss 1967: 15). Examples of this conventional two-step approach in
social-science designs include the large-scale study on job stress by Cooper
et al. (1982) – even though part of their report is devoted to findings from
the preliminary interviews, and Peter Moser’s (1995) survey on quality
expectations among users of conference interpreting.
To round off this picture, specifically as regards surveys addressed to
conference interpreters, one may note that, in number terms, survey
research involving qualitative data has played a marginal role at best. In a
corpus of 40 studies completed up to 2008, only 15 % were found to rely
on qualitative data, beyond the occasional open-ended question
(Pöchhacker 2009).
The above discussion of examples of qualitative research, or at least
of research foregrounding qualitative data in IS is necessarily impression-
istic, and ostensibly biased toward the domain of conference interpreting.
As much as this may fit the image of the “value-laden and biased” scientist
in the qualitative paradigm, I will make an effort in the following, final
section of this paper to provide more systematic evidence of the incidence
of qualitative research as such and of a possible trend toward its increasing
prominence in empirical research in IS (cf. Pöchhacker 2006: 229).
4.3 Balance?
Though identifying a representative data set for a systematic analysis of the

IS literature is a fraught issue, one might begin by examining The Inter-
preting Studies Reader (Pöchhacker & Shlesinger 2002), one of the few
broadly based compilations to date (if another example here of inherent
analytical bias).
Of the 26 chapters dating from roughly four decades (1956 to 2002),
17 are devoted to empirical research or have a significant empirical com-
ponent. Out of these 17, nine are quantitative and seven are qualitative,
including the chapters by Seleskovitch, Lederer, Setton and Wadensjö. One
study (Tate & Turner) could be classified as both quantitative and quali-
tative.
This rather even balance over several decades does not support the
idea of a trend toward more qualitative research; however, the anthology
covers the conference-interpreting classics rather more fully than
community-based domains, the literature on which began to grow strongly
only in the late 1990s.
For the purpose of capturing the development of IS literature from
the early 1990s up to the present, the Benjamins Translation Library (BTL)
as the most important book series in the field can be regarded as a
comprehensive and relevant data set. As of mid-2009, a total of 85 titles
were listed on the publisher’s website (Benjamins 2009). Out of these, 21
can be classified as books devoted mainly to interpreting, from Vol. 3 on
Empirical Research in Simultaneous Interpretation (Lambert & Moser-
Mercer 1994) to Vol. 84, by Claudia Monacelli, on Self-preservation in
Simultaneous Interpreting.
Taking a look at the very first and at the last volume currently
available to me – Vol. 83 by Kumiko Torikai (2009), the contrast could
hardly be more striking: the former a collection of 17 papers on “empirical
research” of which not a single one is based on qualitative data; the latter a
monograph based on five life-story interviews with interpreters, and as far
removed from quantification and numerical significance as one could
imagine.
But picking the first and last clearly does not amount to a represen-
tative sample, so a more systematic account of the 21 interpreting volumes
in the BTL series seems desirable. As can be seen in the above examples,
some of these books are collections of papers by different contributors
whereas others, ten to be precise, were written by single authors. The
eleven collective volumes, in turn, are either based on conference
proceedings (e.g. of the four Critical Link conferences) or, in four cases,
compiled with a focus on a particular theme (empirical research, signed-
language interpreting), purpose (research training), or individual (Daniel
Gile).
Whereas examining the individual contributions to the eleven
collective volumes is beyond the scope of this paper, it is feasible here to
classify the ten single-author monographs with regard to their empirical
component. The result is relatively even: Two of the books were not
designed as empirical studies, and the remaining eight include three quali-
tative (Setton, Diriker, Torikai) and three quantitative studies (Angelelli,

Hale, Sawyer) as well as one (Chernov) with a strong theoretical-analytical
focus and another (Monacelli) whose empirical part is both qualitative and
quantitative.
Both the Interpreting Studies Reader and the single-author mono-
graphs on interpreting in the BTL series thus reflect a relatively balanced
relationship between studies based on quantitative and qualitative data.
This will now be examined for yet another, somewhat richer data set,
namely, the 100 papers published in the journal Interpreting since its
founding in 1996.
Inspired by a recent thematic analysis by Miriam Shlesinger (2009)
of journal content under our editorship, I have categorized all the (60)
papers with a significant empirical component according to the type of data
collected and reported (qualitative, quantitative, or both). The result points
to a clear dominance of research based on quantitative data: whereas 28
papers report quantitative data, mostly from experimental studies, only 17
are exclusively based on qualitative data, with 15 relying on a combination
of qualitative and quantitative data.
To examine changes over time, the data set can be plausibly divided
into the five volumes put out by the founding editors, Barbara Moser-
Mercer and Dominic Massaro (vols 1–5), and the six volumes published
since 2004 (vols 6–11), after a lapse of three years preceding the change in
editorship.
In absolute terms, the difference in the number of qualitative studies
is quite pronounced: four in volumes 1 to 5 vs. 13 in volumes 6 to 11. This
is misleading, however, since the share of empirical research papers pub-
lished in the two periods is very uneven. Though the rate of some ten
papers per volume is fairly constant over the years, the first five volumes
included three issues’ worth of review papers (Ascona I and II workshop
proceedings) as well as a special issue on history. A comparison by data
type is therefore meaningful only in percentage terms. Based on a
respective total of 17 and 43 empirical research papers, there is a small but
appreciable difference in the share of studies relying only on qualitative
data: 23 % in volumes 1 through 5 and 30 % in the period from 2004 to
2009. In the earlier period, roughly two thirds of empirical papers were
based on experiments, whereas the recent six volumes reflect a shift from
experimental toward survey research, with fieldwork data accounting for

around 30 % in either case. These findings, for the type of empirical data as
well as the type of study, are summarized in Figure 1.
Empirical research in Interpreting 1996-2000 (n=17)
6%
23%
29 6 65
qual.
quant.
both
fieldwork survey experiment
71%
Empirical research in Interpreting 2000-2004 (n=43)
33% 30%
qual. 30 26 44
quant.
both
fieldwork survey experiment
37%
Figure 1. Type of empirical data and research in Interpreting
With regard to the question driving this analysis, the most noteworthy
finding to be gleaned from the relationships depicted in Figure 1 may well
be the more than five-fold increase in the percentage of studies reporting
qualitative as well as quantitative data. If these are combined with the
number of purely qualitative studies, the share of research papers pre-
senting qualitative data has in fact more than doubled when comparing the
earlier period (late 1990s) to the more recent volumes of the journal (2004–
2009). In short, the shift reflected in this analysis is not so much an
increase in qualitative research at the expense of studies relying on quanti-
fication, but a trend toward empirical studies combining these two types of
data. (Ideally, the present analysis should do the same – and there are
indeed fascinating examples of various types of approach, but I will leave it

at this review of quantitative data regarding qualitative research in IS.)
5. IS as interpretive studies?
Judging from the examples and quantitative data presented above, it seems
safe to argue that interpreting research has come a long way since its initial
fixation on experimenting in the psycho-statistical paradigm. Even then, in
the 1970s, an alternative approach consisting in the use of naturalistic data
in close proximity to the research participants had been advocated, though
the Paris School’s “interpretive approach” to the analysis of qualitative data
was not yet founded on an interpretive (constructivist) epistemology nor on
the principles of what has come to be known as the paradigm of qualitative
research.
Empirical research relying on qualitative data such as interviews,
field notes, retrospective reports and interpreters’ renditions as such has
been quite visible in IS in recent decades, and by some indicators may be
said to have increased in relation to quantification-based work. Most signi-
ficantly, though, there appears to have been a growth in the number of
studies that combine quantitative and qualitative data and methods. Such
multi-method designs, typically involving the so-called triangulation of
data from different sources, are often seen as a typical feature of qualitative
research, but the correspondence need not be so straightforward, and little
may be gained by expecting researchers to pledge allegiance to either the
quantitative or the qualitative paradigm.
As a complex cognitive as well as social process, and a multifaceted
cultural phenomenon, interpreting is open to and in need of research across
a broad range of methods, and stands to gain from diversity rather than
uniformity of methodological approach. Where consensus does seem
desirable, if not even required, in order to cope with multiple methodo-
logies, is the field’s epistemological underpinning. And what could be
more appropriate to the study of interpreting – which is, first and foremost,
understanding – than an interpretive, constructivist theory of knowledge?
In this sense of IS as “interpretive studies”, understanding how others could
understand something differently would not only be the hallmark of an ex-
cellent interpreter, but also of a credible and respected researcher – such as

the one we are celebrating with this volume.
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The way they were:
subject profiling in translation process research
Ricardo Muñoz Martín
Abstract
Methodology is arguably an area where translation process research (TPR)

could be improved, and one of the aspects in need of attention is subject
profiling. A characterization of informants’ mental abilities and language
skills is proposed by means of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)
and TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) subtests. Results of a
study which tested 17 subjects who also translated four texts using
Translog moderately supports that applying these tests may be useful for
both filtering out ‘irregular’ subjects and for ranking ‘regular’ informants
according to parameters relevant for TPR. Ways to simplify, shorten and
standardize test administration are also discussed.
1. Introduction
Back in 1995, when Arnt Lykke Jakobsen developed Translog (Jakobsen

1998), research by means of TAPs had already attracted some criticism,
casting doubts on the reliability of data, as evidenced in works which could
only be read later (e.g. Bernardini 1999, 2001; Li 2004; Jakobsen 2003).
But by that time, Jakobsen probably did not have a clear notion of how
influential his initiative would turn out to be. From then on, empirical
research into translation processes (TPR) has expanded into a thriving
branch of Translatology, witness the variety of topics and methods
summarized by Göpferich (2008). Ever since Translog made it possible to
record and measure typists’ keyboard activities, it has been one of the
favorite data collection tools.
Advances in, and diversification of, data collection procedures have
come with a sound, growing concern with methodological issues (e.g.
Kußmaul & Tirkkonen-Condit 1995; Dancette & Ménard 1996; Fraser
88 Ricardo Muñoz Martín
1996; Kußmaul 1998; Orozco 1999; Lauffer 2002; Neunzig 2002; Williams
& Chesterman 2002; Alves 2003b; Hansen 2003, 2006; Lörscher 2005;
O’Brien 2005; PACTE 2005; Campbell & Wakim 2007; Bayer-
Hohenwarter 2008; Göpferich 2008; Muñoz 2009). However, some of the
problems faced by our forerunners in the eighties and the nineties remain
unsolved.
Some TPR problems seem associated with the need for a consistent
theoretical framework to interpret data1 (cf. Risku 2000; Rydning 2001;
Muñoz 2006), others are related to the nature of our research designs.
There is still enormous variation between TPR projects in terms of research
foci, research protocols, ecological validity, subjects’ categorization, source
texts and data interpretation (cf. Fraser 1996; Rodrigues 2002). While it is
true that some of these factors may be irrelevant for certain research goals,
others are pervasive and threaten to maintain current endeavors as a
heterogeneous set of juxtaposed attempts which cannot be interconnected,
nor built upon. In short, progress in methodology has not lived up to
improvements in data collection procedures.
Following Göpferich’s (2008: 9–16) classification criteria, we might
describe most current TPR efforts as qualitative endeavors focusing
(mainly) on online processes by means of methodologies inspired by
psycholinguistics and collecting data at one point in time only, although
there are some longitudinal studies underway (e.g. Hansen, on sources of
interference, TransComp and PACTE, on the acquisition of translation
competence). A different, popular classification distinguishes between pre-
experimental, quasi-experimental, and true experimental designs (Campbell
& Stanley 1963; Cook & Campbell 1979). Pre-experimental designs adhere
to the scientific method, but they do not make use of control groups. Quasi-
experimental designs employ diverse means of comparing groups, but they
fail to randomize the choice of subjects or their assignment to control and
study groups. True experimental designs satisfy both conditions. Thus, the
main difference between these categories relates to the way subjects are
dealt with.
1
In an intelligent move which temporarily sets aside the lack of an uncontested
framework, some research teams, such as LETRA and TransComp, have developed
storage and codification systems which will make data available for new analyses in
the future.
Subject profiling in translation process research 89
Many TPR projects belong to the category of pre-experimental designs,

which comprise case studies, one-group pre-test/post-test strategies and
static group comparisons (cross-sectional studies). Case studies are considered
to be the least reliable, since they tend to prematurely assume links between
causes and effects. Pre-test/post-test designs provide measurements of
changes, but their conclusions may be biased since there is no control group
to compare with the experimental groups and thus the researcher cannot be
sure whether it was really the experimental manipulation what caused the
observed differences between the subjects. Finally, static group comparisons
often fail to discern pre-experimental conditions in the subjects; moreover,
the purported similarities within groups (e.g. translation students vs.
professional translators) compromise the inferred differences between
them. In my opinion, much TPR runs into one or the other of these
problems which, again, bring the handling of subjects to the forefront.
As far as subjects are concerned, control groups are a must, but we
need to introduce some other cautions in order to reduce systemic bias and
to enhance internal validity. Since random selection of subjects may prove
difficult and random assignment to study and control groups may not be
feasible in many studies, we need to discuss and agree on ways to reduce
uncontrolled variables in the subjects of our experiments. Ideally, we
should find a way to supplement our data on the subjects with reliable
numerical indexes expressing differences in relevant variables, to allow us
to (a) screen out subjects on the grounds of atypical scores; (b) refine data
analyses by taking into account relevant characteristics of the subjects,
whether within the same experiment or compared to those from other,
unrelated trials, and (c) triangulate them with hard process data, such as
time, segmentation, and recursiveness measurements.
At present these criteria are only desiderata, and this article aims to
prompt a discussion about them by proposing a two-fold characterization of
test subjects both in terms of their mental abilities and their linguistic skills
(in English). Blasco (2007) shows that using the Wechsler Adult
Intelligence Scale (WAIS) and TOEFL tests may enable us to profile the
subjects but, in order to illustrate the approach, some research findings of
an ad hoc research project will be summarized in Section 3.
2. Testing mental abilities
Many TPR projects use psychological concepts such as strategy, expertise,

competence and the like, so a psychological approach to profiling subjects
in our experiments should ensure conceptual coherence. Psychological tests
seem the best option, for they often render numerical, scaled results.
Neuropsychological and personality tests are ruled out because they usually
look for disorders in the subjects. Achievement tests do not seem to allow
for comparisons between experiments with different original texts; they may
be used in a specific project, but their results would not be transferable to
the next. Occupational tests try to match subjects’ interests with those of
persons in known careers, but they do not seem very useful in our case
(they would not be very informative of subjects’ abilities); nor do aptitude
tests since, more often than not, the nature of aptitudes and skills in
translating is the very object of study. That leaves us with intelligence tests.
When dealing with intelligence, psychologists do not seem to agree
about much more than its basic definition (cf. Neisser et al. 1996). For
instance, Gottfredson (2002) asserts that different abilities involved in
intelligence merge into a single, general factor known as g, whereas
Wittmann & Süß (1997) insist that g is only the apex of a hierarchical
structure. Converting intelligence into a score is rightfully mistrusted – not
only in psychology2 – but, crucially, most major intelligence tests are
composed of around a dozen subtests which measure specific cognitive
dimensions and constructs. Rather than classifying subjects according to
their IQ, we should be interested in some of the cognitive abilities that add
to it, because a more detailed account might be more suited to controlling
and profiling subjects and triangulating translation process data.
2
Gould (1981: 24–25) argued that psychometrics is a form of scientific racism since
“the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its
quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to
rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably find that oppressed and
disadvantaged groups – races, classes, or sexes – are innately inferior and deserve their
status.” The second edition of his book, The Mismeasure of Man (1996), was enlarged to
include an explicit rejection of The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray 1994), which
argued that intelligence is a better predictor than educational level and parents’
socioeconomic status of factors such as financial income, job performance, and crime.
Two composite intelligence tests stand out from the rest as far as
reliability and popularity are concerned: the Stanford-Binet Intelligence
Scale and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). Stanford-Binet
measures working memory, visual-spatial processing, knowledge,
quantitative reasoning, and fluid reasoning in subjects between 2 and 23
years old, and it is better than WAIS at ferreting out extremes (geniuses,
mental retardation). WAIS measures working memory, processing speed,
verbal comprehension, and perceptual organization in adults between 16
and 89 years old, and its reliability is outstanding (Kaufman &
Lichtenberger 1999). Since many subjects in TPR are older than 23, WAIS
seems better suited for subject profiling.
The Perceptual Organization Index (POI) in the WAIS test measures
fluid reasoning (matrix reasoning subtest), spatial processing, attentiveness
to detail and visual-motor integration. It is primarily a measure of perceptual
(visual) processing, and it is not clear whether it is important for our
purposes, perhaps except when eye tracking is used. Since POI subtests
have been thoroughly revised in the WAIS4,3 and since indexing subjects
according to mental abilities should not be confused with IQ testing, it is
perhaps best to omit this section (see Section 6). Several research projects,
such as the TOP Ullevål 600 study of the University of Oslo, make use of a
limited number of the WAIS3 subtests only to measure specific abilities.
Let us have a glimpse at working memory (WM) and processing speed (PS).
2.1 Working Memory
WM is a theoretical construct (Daneman & Carpenter 1980) to refer to the

ability to keep important information active in mind while comprehending,
thinking, and acting. It is involved in higher-order mental processes such as
problem solving (Bühner et al. 2008), tasks such as writing (Kellog 2001)
and text editing (Hayes & Chenoweth 2006), as well as actions such as
saccadic eye movements (Barton et al. 2006; Bays & Husain 2008). In a
3
The WAIS test has been subjected to several revisions. The latest version, WAIS4,
was released in 2008. The version discussed here is WAIS3 (1997), for which
standardized versions are already available for many major languages, including
Chinese (cf. Yao et al. 2007), French (EIWA-3, Wechsler 2000), German (HAWIE-3,
cf. Von Aster et al. 2006), Portuguese (cf. do Nascimento & de Figueiredo 2002), and
Spanish (EIWA-3, 1999; cf. García et al. 2003).
study of more than 3,000 schoolchildren (ages 5–11), Alloway et al. (2009)
found that roughly 10 % had low WM scores which might explain
problems such as deficient monitoring of the quality of their work, and
difficulties in generating new solutions to problems.
WM seems to be able to predict some translation-relevant skills, such
as L1 fluency (Daneman 1991) and recall (Braga Tomitch 1999). WM also
interacts with foreign language skills (Van den Noort et al. 2006). In L2,
for example, WM seems to correlate positively4 with L2 fluency, accuracy,
and complexity (Mota 2003). WM also seems to be a good predictor of
success in mathematical problem solving (Holmes & Adams 2006; De
Smedt et al. 2009) and insight problem-solving, i.e., the phenomenon of
suddenly solving an apparently difficult problem (Murray & Byrne 2005),
and in reasoning (Süß et al. 2002). Furthermore, WM may also be used to
predict multitasking performance (Konig et al. 2005), where it can predict
errors of commission, i.e., errors related to addressing a task demand
incorrectly, as opposed to errors of omission, i.e., allowing a task demand
to lapse (Oberlander et al. 2007). The fragmentary way of reading while
translating might also be influenced by WM, for high-span readers’
performance on hypertexts seems to equal that of low-span readers on
linear texts (Fontanini 2005).
Bajo et al. (2001), Rothe-Neves (2003), Liu et al. (2004), Dragsted
(2005), Macizo & Bajo (2005), Mizuno (2005), Padilla et al. (2007: 59–79)
and Timarová (2008), among others, have already underscored the
importance of WM in translation and interpreting processes. Since, in
general, “working memory may even be the primary determinant of
proficiency in cognitive domains, at least when the influence of prior
knowledge and experience is minimal” (Hambrick & Engle 2003: 190), the
above-mentioned factors suggest that WM scores might have a strong
explanatory power in TPR as well, where they might become a predictor of
translation problem-solving success.
4
Fortunately, like other cognitive abilities, WM develops over time and can also be
improved under certain circumstances. For example, Klein & Boals (2001) suggest
that expressive writing can increase WM capacity, and Ransdell et al. (2001) show
that fluency in another language may confer long-term working memory benefits.
2.2 Processing speed
Processing speed (PS) in the WAIS3 test refers to the speed at which
cognitive processes can be carried out, and it relates to the ability to
automatically perform easy or overlearned cognitive tasks. PS does not
seem related to successful problem solving (Welsh et al. 1999), although it
does correlate with errors caused by omissions (Oberlander et al. 2007).
Nevertheless, PS is interesting for other reasons. For instance, it seems to
be related to WM efficiency. A higher PS might reduce demands on WM,
thereby fostering reasoning and learning (Zhu & Weiss 2005: 315); a lower
PS, on the other hand, may degrade cognitive performance because the
result of previous processing may have faded away when needed in
subsequent mental operations (Salthouse 1996). So, PS seems to have an
indirect effect on the way the mind works, and not only on its pace, as
experimental results indicate for aspects such as verbal ability (Wiedel &
Schwartz 1982), creativity (Rindermann & Neubauer 2004), abstract
reasoning and, indeed, problem solving in tasks where subjects do not need
to retrieve information from their long-term memories (“fluid intelligence;”
Sheppard & Vernon 2008).
From a developmental point of view, PS becomes faster until ages 25
to 30, and then starts a slow, steady decline (McGrew & Woodcock 2001).
Expertise may reduce this decline (Nunes & Kramer 2009), so that abilities
of older high-level experts may exceed those of younger persons with
lower levels of expertise (Horn & McArdle 2007). Since expertise levels
are relevant for many TPR projects, and Horn & McArdle (2007: 241)
found that expertise speed and cognitive speed were collinear, PS might
become an important touchstone against which to contrast translation
expertise levels.
There are other reasons why PS could be important for TPR studies.
Some TPR projects reach conclusions said to be related to translation speed
(e.g. automation, expertise level) but which have been arrived at through
typing speed. However, the translation behavior of (mainly trainee)
subjects in our studies is often hindered by their lack of typing skills (that
is, by slower movement times5), which does not necessarily correlate with
lower PS scores but, so far, we have no way to account for this difference.
Indexing subjects as to their mental PS might do the job, and thus this
might have been an interesting supplement to studies where timing was
important, such as De Rooze (2003), Rothe-Neves (2003), Dimitrova
(2005), Dragsted (2005), Jakobsen (2005), and Sharmin et al. (2008).
Furthermore, in TPR we use the terms planning and reviewing to
broadly refer to macrotextual phases of text production, as usual in writing
research (Jakobsen 2002). In psychology, Hayes & Flower (1986) also
identified planning, actual text generation, and reviewing as the three key
processes in L1 writing, but at a microtextual level. Levy & Ransdell
(1995) found that the median time for text generation was 7.5 seconds,
whereas planning, and reviewing/revising took about 2.5 seconds each (that
is, activities alternated at these rates). Figures should be different when
translating, due to the interplay with the original text, but one of the
characteristics associated to better performance when translating is routine
interiorization, i.e. procedural automation as evidenced by uneventful, fast
renderings. Differences between monolingual writing and the automated
translation of segments might yield information as to the specifics of
translating. Hence, this microtextual approach might also be very
informative in segmentation and pause analyses. Under this scope, PS
might turn out to be a reliable index to triangulate microtextual translation
planning, generating, and reviewing/revising phases in subjects as well.
3. Testing language command
A second area of interest to profiling subjects in translation research is

language command, since there is enormous variation between all subjects,
not only between trainees. TPR researchers seem very conscious of the
importance of the native tongue for translating successfully, but there are
very few samples of research projects where this variable has been
controlled. The WAIS3 is usually administered in the subjects’ native
tongue and its Verbal Comprehension Index (VCI) results from aggregating
5
Ericsson (2003: 57–58) summarizes research findings which point to reading in
advance and preparing movements ahead as the main means of distinguishing expert
from regular typists. Both characteristics may improve with higher PS.
scores from subtests focusing on verbal reasoning, concept formation,

comprehension, acquired knowledge, and attention to verbal stimuli. Here,
subtest scores are probably interesting per se, but the composite VCI may
also be used as an indicator of the subjects’ language skills. Since WAIS3
has been normalized for many languages, using VCI as an index of native
tongue command might also make it possible to compare results of TPR
projects working with different languages.6
In foreign language skills, the point of departure should probably be
the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR;
Council of Europe 2001). Most language tests correlated to the levels of
skill in the CEFR are criterion-referenced, i.e., they assess subjects’
abilities without ranking them against those of their peers.7 These levels
might be mapped onto numerical scales to convert them into computable
indexes, but their results would be rather uninformative because only the
two, maybe three, highest levels seem relevant for TPR subjects (B2,
independent user with limited operational proficiency; C1, proficient user
with effective operational proficiency; C2, proficient user with
comprehensive mastery; Council of Europe 2001: 22–29). That is, except
for some cases with entry-level trainees, the lower levels in the six-fold
scale would be useless, for no subject in a TPR test would score that low.
Therefore, the higher levels would not provide a clear image of inter-
subject variation: all professionals and most advanced trainees, for
instance, are likely to fall into the C1 and C2 categories. In other words, it
would help researchers divide subjects into simply those with good or better
language skills (which is fine, but not enough), without any further
refinement being possible. So here we seem to reach a dead end, except for
the English TOEFL exam, which should be reliable enough for our purposes.8
6
Verbal comprehension subtests should not be used to test foreign language skills,
since psychologists do not consider it appropriate to administer the test in languages
other than the subjects’ own. See, however, results for subject X below.
7
This is the case for Cambridge exams for English, CIEP/Alliance Française for
French, Goethe Institut/TELC for German, and DELE for Spanish.
8
The Educational Testing Service (ETS), which administers the TOEFL, states on its
web page that more than 6000 colleges, universities, and licensing agencies in 136
countries use it as indicator of the English skills of their applicants. More than 20
million test takers (cumulative figure) let ETS publish statistics summarizing results
by study level, gender, native tongue, and country.
At the end of 2005, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) made

available an Internet-based version of the test (IBT), which also introduced
variations in its contents and structure. The IBT writing section comprises
two parts: writing on what has been read and listened to, and a free
composition. Compositions are reviewed by two ETS evaluators. In order
to ensure reliability, our research subjects would need to register for the
test, but the IBT is not administered in all countries. Also, costs would be
far too high, so this would rule out this option in most cases. That leaves us
with training copies of the paper-based version (PBT).
The PBT is divided into three sections: listening comprehension,
structure and written expression, and reading comprehension, and they take
the form of batteries of multiple-choice questions. Oral language skills are
important for a good command of the language but they are not so
immediately important for translating.9 The section on structure and written
expression (T2) seems more closely related to formal knowledge of the
English language, whereas reading comprehension (T3) does not depend
only on language command. Rather, good comprehenders are characterized
by a better use of metacognitive strategies (Dickson et al. 1998). Hence, for
TPR purposes, we might be interested in both sections.
4. Case study
4.1 Materials and methods
In order to put this proposal to the test, 21 4th-year translation students at

the University of Granada were requested as part of their training tasks to
translate four texts under normal computerized classroom conditions using
Translog. They also took the Verbal Comprehension, Working Memory and
Processing Speed subtests of the WAIS3, and sections T2 and T3 of a
training PBT. Four subjects were male (A, E, I and O) and the rest were
female, and they were all right-handed. All originals were complete texts of
approximately 450 words, and they were all taken from The Economist.
Translations of excerpts or full articles from The Economist are often
published in the Spanish press, so the assignments were acceptably
9
Anyway, Dunkel & Davies (1994: 65) have shown that TOEFL scores do not capture
the real abilities in oral comprehension in ESL University students.
realistic. Translations were performed against the clock: subjects had to try
to complete them in one hour, although they were told in advance they
should finish their translations even if they took longer. Subjects’ times to
complete the four texts were averaged and are displayed in Table 1 under
translation time (TT).
Translations were revised by a translation teacher, a professional
translator with more than 10 years of in-house experience in a translation
and localization company, and a translation graduate/PhD student who had
started to work as a freelance translator. Quality evaluation followed
guidelines summarized in Muñoz & Conde (2007). Evaluators were
requested to perform the task to the best of their knowledge and without
any specific instructions except for the requirement to later classify each
translation into one of four categories: very bad, bad, good, and very good.
These categories were then converted into numerical scores and results for
the four texts were averaged, converted into a 100 scale, and rounded. In
Table 1, they are shown under average grade (AG).
In order to triangulate data, reformulations were defined as “changes
in the copy which include either syntactic modifications or a different lexical
choice for at least one item,” and repetitions were defined as “deletions
followed by the typing of exactly the same string,” so that they would also
comprise those of just one character, including punctuation marks, but not
blank spaces. These parameters were chosen because of their objective
nature and their potential relationship with problem solving in translation.
Two evaluators independently computed reformulations and repetitions in
the texts. No significant differences were found, and results were averaged.
Two of the subjects had technical problems and did not manage to
record all translations, and a third one was ill for a short period of time and
was therefore not able to translate all four texts. Subject X was a foreign
language native speaker, so her data were not computed, although they are
shown in Table 1 below to illustrate the contrast with native speakers.
4.2 Results and discussion
The results for 18 students are summarized in Table 1. Scores for the
TOEFL and grades have been converted to a 100 point scale, to ease the
analysis. WAIS3 scores are already averaged on a 100 point scale from the
start, with an SD of 15, so scores below 85 and above 115 may safely be
considered meaningful.
Table 1. Subjects’ ages (Age) and scores for working memory (WM), processing
speed (PS), verbal comprehension (VC), TOEFL sections 2 and 3 (T2 and T3),
average translation time (TT), and average grade (AG); subjects in each group
arranged according to their WM scores
Subj A B C D E F G I H J
Age 21 21 21 34 21 21 23 22 22 21
WM 117 118 122 124 125 127 129 132 134 139
PS 123 114 125 132 123 93 132 134 140 117
VC 111 123 110 108 114 103 100 121 106 110
T2 92 88 57 85 83 72 82 87 63 82
T3 95 93 85 87 90 81 88 93 90 100
TT 48:43 48:21 40:28 48:03 51:42 48:42 51:41 45:01 43:55 48:57
AG 95 95 75 60 80 90 85 85 70 80
Subj K L O M N P Q X
Age 23 23 21 21 22 21 23 26
WM 81 83 100 100 102 107 108 129
PS 98 117 112 117 125 118 106 101
VC 102 110 104 110 102 119 104 98
T2 78 83 83 85 75 92 83 85
T3 50 92 90 87 93 95 88 88
TT 58:30 53:47 44:32 46:18 46:07 45:47 49:23 50:22
AG 75 75 80 70 75 85 50 60
From the point of view of screening out informants (our first goal), subjects
K and L showed significant low scores for WM. When all subjects are
considered, this amounts to roughly 10 %, the same rate Alloway et al.
(2009) found in children. These subjects probably never had special
training to improve their WM, so they might run into some of the
aforementioned troubles found in children as well. Although the average
grade for their translations did not seem particularly affected, they were the
ones who took longest to perform the tasks, owing to both more frequent
and longer pauses. Hence, when behavior is to be observed and time is a
relevant factor, subjects with WM scores below 85, such as K and L,
should probably be omitted from the study,10 for their behavior might be
affected by this special circumstance, as evidenced by the low English
verbal comprehension scores (T3) in subject K – whose scores were low
for both WM and PS – though higher than those of subjects C, F, H, and N
in formal English command (T2).
Subject X took the WAIS3 subtest battery in Spanish as well, where
she had standard scores in PS, high scores in WM, and slightly low scores
in VC. Her scores for T2 were moderately high (sample av. 80.5) and
average in T3 (sample av. 88). She also took long to translate the texts, and
her results were poor, probably due to her lacking Spanish skills.
Table 2. Average scores for the whole sample (17) and groups with low, standard
and high WM capacities
Sample sd Low sd Standard sd High sd

Age 21.7 0.87 23 0 21.6 0.89 21.4 0.73
WM 114.6 17.17 82.0 1.41 103.4 3.85 126.7 6.99
PS 120.8 10.81 107.5 13.44 115.6 7.09 126.7 8.46
VC 108.4 6.03 106.0 5.66 107.8 6.94 110.6 7.24
T2 83.3 5.49 80.5 3.54 83.7 1.16 79.1 11.42
T3 90.4 4.55 71.0 29.70 90.6 3.36 90.2 5.39
TT 47:35 3:20 56:08 3:20 46:04 0:15 47:33 3:29
AG 79.7 9.39 75 0 77.5 6.46 81.5 11.07
As to refining data analyses by taking these factors into account, Table 2

presents averages for subjects grouped according to their WM capacities
(low, standard, high). Results show that 10 students (Table 1, upper row)
had above standard scores for WM, 8 of whom also had high processing
speeds. This amounts to roughly 50 % of all students. Padilla (1995) found
that advanced simultaneous interpreting trainees also had larger WM
capacities, and she suggested that training in interpretation might contribute
to explain this feature, so it is tempting to expand this hypothesis to cover
translation students as well. However, the University of Granada’s
translation program has a constant, very high number of applicants, which
in the English major exceeds the capacity of the program. In such cases, the
10
Subjects F, J, L, N and X showed a difference higher than 20 points between WM and
PS scores. Dehn (2006: 107) considers this gap both significant and infrequent but
Binder et al. (2009) think of it as normal variations within healthy adults.
public education system will prioritize students according to their

secondary education and entrance examination grades, which in certain
years means that the students with the lowest grades registering for their
first-year courses have a grade point average of B+ or even A-. Since WM
is considered a good predictor of academic achievement, it might well be
the case that these students had high WM capacities from the start.
Data show that translations by the group with high WM scores were
awarded slightly better grades even if their English command was slightly
lower, as expressed by T2 (there were important variations within the group,
but note subject H). This difference is nearly leveled out in (English)
reading comprehension (T3), so their higher mental capacities, including
higher VC (i.e., better language skills in Spanish), are a good candidate for
explaining these small differences. In fact, PS and T3 had a small, positive
correlation (0.493*), and T3 also had a small, negative correlation with the
time subjects took to translate the texts (-0.537*).
When data were triangulated, the group with standard WM scores
yielded an average of 44.37 reformulations while the group with high WM
scores had introduced 25.87 only. Thus, higher WM capacities might have
a direct influence on the planning of solutions. No remarkable differences
were observed for repetitions (standard WM: 12; high WM: 13.5). Since
the group with standard WM scores had slightly significant high PS scores
(115.6) as well, repetition rates were recalculated by rearranging groups
according to an arbitrary threshold of a 120 PS score. This resulted in one
group of standard-to-high PS rates (subjects B, F, J, M, O, and P) and
another group with higher PS rates (subjects A, C, D, E, G, H, I, and N).
The first group had a rate of 16.75 repetitions, whereas subjects in the new
group of higher PS scores averaged only 11 repetitions. Hence, high PS
scores might have had an influence on repetitions. No explanation can be
advanced for this, however, and it might just be a product of chance.
5. Conclusion
There is not much to conclude from a proposal based on work in progress

whose aim is to prompt an exchange of ideas, and which is illustrated by
such a small sample. Results suggest that significantly low WM/PS scores
might distort research results when timed behavior is considered. Some small
differences in both behavior and results were found which distinguished

subjects with standard WM scores from those with high WM scores. This,
and the possible influence of high WM scores on fewer reformulations and,
perhaps, that of high PS scores on fewer repetitions, definitely deserve
further study. Language skills are also variables which need to be controlled to
improve the reliability of data interpretation. Admittedly, they have not
been a primary concern in this piece of work, but large differences between
subjects in the study provide some food for thought.
In any case, the study points to the possibility of using WAIS3 indexes
and TOEFL scores as adequate indexes to profile subjects in TPR. If data
with larger samples corroborate the differences, TPR researchers might be
able to compare subjects across trials and, crucially, we would also be able
to tap on results of other study populations researched in psychology and
education. If correlations between test scores and training and expertise
levels were consistent, this strategy might also open up the possibility of
normalizing the definitions of translation trainees (beginners, novices,
advanced, graduates), professionals, and experts by associating them to
certain scores in the battery (e.g., VC, TOEFL; see, for instance, Ronowicz
et al. 2005), and also to find some cognitive and linguistic explanations for
some idiosyncratic results. If differences are not replicated, then we will
have to look for another meaningful way to profile subjects.
6. Post Scriptum
Further work seems necessary to ease both testing and the interpretation of
results, and also to reduce the time they take. The standard administration
of the full WAIS3 takes more than 90 minutes (Ryan et al. 1998), which is
very long.11 WAIS3 tests are designed to be administered orally and
individually, so its application seems clearly impractical. As for the TOEFL
test, the administration of the reading comprehension section takes about
one hour and the section on structure and written expression, about half an
hour. When added to the time WAIS3 subtests take, it means that subjects
11
This has prompted the design of many short forms, either by leaving out the easiest
and most difficult items in each subtest or by reducing the number of subtests.
However, short forms of the WAIS3 are, simply, less reliable (Jeyakumar et al.
2004).
will have to spend three additional hours with the researchers. This is a
grave disadvantage. Furthermore, administering and scoring a battery of
WAIS3 subtests is not an easy task and may result in variations (Ryan &
Schnakenberg-Ott 2003; Kaufman & Lichtenberger 2005: 197–202). But
there may be other strategies to ease the task, apart from abandoning POI
altogether.
Braden (1999: 2) states that evaluators can change the timing, the
setting, and the formats of both test presentation and response to
accommodate clients with disabilities, and illustrates this with a version of
WAIS3 translated into American Sign Language for the deaf. Also, Rossi
et al. (2007) found no significant differences between individual and
collective administration of the WAIS3. Thus, there exists the possibility of
standardizing a written presentation and response format of the WAIS3 test
set as a web page.12 This strategy might make administration easier and,
crucially, homogeneous across trials, even when applied to several subjects
at once. The scoring of results can also be automated, in such a way that the
researcher may only need to choose some statistical variables, as in the
example provided in Crawford et al. (2008).
So, there may be ways to shorten and homogenize test administration
and interpretation, in such a way that profiling subjects becomes both more
feasible and more manageable. It will still be time-consuming. However,
this should not be seen as an impediment, but just as both a disadvantage
and a challenge. Plants and stones don’t move, gases and stars don’t think,
machines and materials don’t feel. In the social sciences, the quest for
validity demands additional work, but that is exactly what makes it so
fascinating. And in the last decades, Arnt has taught us that it is worth the
effort.
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Exploring retrospection as a research method for studying the
translation process and the interpreting process
Birgitta Englund Dimitrova & Elisabet Tiselius
Abstract
This is an exploratory study of retrospection as a research method for
investigating problems and strategies both in simultaneous interpreting and
in translation. It is based on data from six subjects, three performing a
translation task, three an interpreting task, with retrospection cued by the
source text/source speech. In the coding of the retrospective protocols, the
categories devised by Ivanova (1999) for interpreting were applied and
found to be applicable to translation as well. Retrospection yielded similar
data for both groups, in terms of amount of data and reported instances of
problems, monitoring and strategies.
1. Introduction
In this study, we explore retrospection as a research method for

investigating the cognitive processes and the strategies adopted for problem
solving in simultaneous interpreting (SI) and in translation. We wish to
discover how much and what types of information can be gained from data
using this method, as well as what kinds of analyses are feasible. Here we
report on the first part of the study, based on data from three interpreting
subjects and three translation subjects. The study is to a large extent
exploratory, aimed at finding a suitable method, including testing an
existing method for coding and analysis.
The limited number of experiments for which this method has been
used makes a study of retrospection comparing SI and translation highly
relevant. Our results for translation can subsequently be compared with
those obtained for a relatively large number of process-oriented studies
published from the 1980s onwards. But even more importantly, perhaps, it
will allow us to evaluate this research method for interpreting, where few
other introspective methods are possible.
110 Birgitta Englund Dimitrova & Elisabet Tiselius
2. Retrospection for studying translation and interpreting processes
2.1 Retrospection as a research method
Retrospection is an introspective method, tapping subjects’ cognitive

processes via their own reports. It builds on the assumption that parts of the
information from the subject’s working memory during a particular task are
stored in long-term memory and can be retrieved afterwards (Ericsson &
Simon 1984/1993: 149). Retrospection is facilitated if the task was recent
and of short duration.
A disadvantage of retrospection is that it generally does not allow
complete recall of the information. Also, what is recalled does not
necessarily have the same form as when it was being attended to in
working memory, since it has undergone processes of abstraction,
generalisation, elaboration, etc. (see Englund Dimitrova 2005). Actual
sequences of the results of cognitive processes will be recalled in
retrospection with accuracy and completeness for tasks of 0.5 to 10 seconds
(Ericsson & Simon 1984/1993: xvi); but for tasks that require, for instance,
7 to 10 minutes, “the accuracy of information in retrospective reports may
be reduced by forgetting” (Ericsson & Simon 1984/1993: xxi).
Retrospection is usually done with a cue to facilitate recall.
2.2 Retrospection for the study of the translation process
There are a substantial number of studies on the translation process using

introspective methods, such as think-aloud (TA) (see, e.g. Hansen 2006a,
Jääskeläinen 1999, Krings 1986). A bibliography can be found in
Jääskeläinen (2002); for an overview of process studies, see Göpferich
(2008). Often, TA is combined with other methods, such as computer
logging of the writing process (Englund Dimitrova 2005, Jakobsen 1999).
The TA method has been shown to have certain effects on the process itself,
such as an increase in time necessary for the task (Ericsson & Simon
1984/1993); for a study on the effect of TA on the translation process, see
Jakobsen (2003). Collecting introspective data through retrospection has
the clear advantage of not having effects on the process itself.
On the other hand, the risk of incomplete or distorted data from
retrospection in longer tasks cannot be ignored. This makes it potentially
Exploring retrospection as a research method 111
less suitable for translation, which often requires quite a long time. In
addition, translation tasks are characterized by a recursive mode of working
with the same textual material (the source text, the growing target text), e.g.
revision carried out in several run-throughs of the text. This may make it
difficult or impossible for subjects to recall accurately at what point during
the task a certain problem was processed.1
Software for computer logging with a replay function, such as
Translog, has given an upsurge to retrospection for studying the translation
process. Here, retrospection is cued by the source text (ST) and the replay
of the process of target text (TT) writing, both of which are shown on the
computer screen. Aspects studied have for instance been the effect of time
pressure on the process, and sources of disturbance in the process (see, e.g.,
Hansen 1999, 2006a, b).
2.3 Retrospection for the study of the interpreting process
When investigating SI, retrospection is one of the few available methods to

probe into the interpreters’ cognitive processes through their own reports,
since concurrent verbalisation is obviously ruled out. Nevertheless, it has
not been used widely in SI research. The first comprehensive study was
undertaken by Ivanova (1999), who investigated expertise in simultaneous
interpreting. In 2002, this was followed by a study by Vik-Tuovinen
(2002), who investigated simultaneous interpreters at different levels of
proficiency. Napier (2003) also employed retrospection in her study of
omissions by sign-language interpreters. Other research using retrospection
can be found in Bartlomiejczyk (2006) and Chang and Schallert (2007),
both of whom studied directionality in simultaneous interpreting,
Bartlomiejczyk to map strategy use and Chang and Schallert (2007) to
undertake a qualitative analysis of strategy use.
1
This is confirmed by Levy et al. (1996), who found the correspondence between data
from introspection and retrospection obtained from the same subjects during a writing
task to be quite low: in the best case, 75 % of the retrospective responses matched the
ones given concurrently with task performance; whereas in the worst case, such a
match was found only in 10.5 % of the responses (Levy et al. 1996: 553).
2.4 The cue for retrospection
In a retrospection task, choosing the cue is important. It should facilitate

the subjects’ recall of the cognitive processes during the original task so as
to yield as rich retrospective data as possible. At the same time it is
important to reduce to a minimum the risk of it becoming the source of new
cognitive processes that were not part of the original task. Retrospection is
facilitated if the cue is the same or similar to the original cue (Ericsson &
Simon 1987, Gile 1997, Ivanova 1999: 168).
Possible cues for retrospection in a translation task are the ST, the
final version of the TT, a log file of the writing process being replayed in
real time (see above), or a video recording of the task performance.
Similarly, for retrospection after an interpreting task, different cues are
possible: the source speech, recorded or as a written transcript, the recorded
interpreting, or a video recording. Ivanova’s (1999) study is the only one to
use only the ST as a cue. Her subjects were given a transcript of the ST and
asked to read it through segment by segment, trying to recall everything
about the thoughts that occurred to them in the course of the task (1999:
170). In the other studies on interpreting mentioned in Section 2.3, the cue
was linked to the subjects’ own production. Vik-Tuovinen’s (2002)
subjects did retrospection from a transcription of the ST and a recording of
the ST and their own interpreting, stopping the tape for comments and
recall. The same method was used by Chang and Schallert (2007). Napier
(2003) did retrospection cued by video-recordings of the task. The
participants were asked to comment selectively on the omissions they had
made. Bartlomiejczyk (2006) used only a recorded source for retrospection,
namely a dual-track recording of the speech and the interpreting.
Thus most researchers using retrospection, both for translation and
for interpreting tasks, have opted for a cue consisting of either the replay of
the writing process or the interpreted version, with or without the ST. The
risk of this method, however, is that the cue gives rise to new cognitive
processes that can distort the data: informants faced with their own product
comment on their product rather than on their process. They are likely to
evaluate, to react emotionally, and to rationalize, to explain, etc.2
2
It should be noted that all researchers above point out that they instructed their
informants to comment only on the process.
2.5 Triangulation of methods
In our study, we follow Ivanova’s (1999) design for the interpreting task,
slightly adapting it for the translation task. Thus we use only a written
transcript of the ST, not allowing our subjects to listen to their own
interpreting or see their own TT while doing their retrospection.
The interpreting task was recorded and the translation task logged
with Translog. Since the process data were not used as a cue for
retrospection, it can be triangulated with the retrospective data.
Furthermore, by presenting the ST sentences one by one in the translation
task we tried to minimise the above-mentioned recursiveness and ensure
that the processing relevant to the translation of a particular sentence was
done while the subject was still working on that sentence. This should
guarantee that processes recalled really did occur at that point in time, and
will facilitate triangulation with the Translog data.
We thus have two principal types of data tapping into the cognitive
processes: on-line and off-line. Importantly, the off-line data are generated
independently of the on-line data. This is shown schematically in Figure 1,
where the arrows indicate the cueing for the tasks:
source text/source speech
on-line data: off-line data:

taped interpreting (oral data, with retrospection cued by source text or source
pauses, hesitations, repairs, etc.) speech
or logging data (written data, with
pauses, revisions, etc.)
In contrast, retrospection cued by the recorded interpreting or the replay

function of Translog can be presented schematically thus:
source text/source speech
on-line data: logging with Translog/recorded interpreting
off-line data: retrospection based on source text and replay function of

Translog/recorded interpreting
Figure 2. Retrospection cued by subjects’ own production
Figure 2 shows a form of step-wise-cuing, which may yield rich

retrospective data, but where it is difficult to know to what extent
retrospection probes the original processes and to what extent it probes –
concurrently – processes elicited by the second cuing. Here, there is a risk
that the cue itself may cause processes of abstraction, elaboration, etc.
2.6 Comparing retrospection after translation and interpreting
Retrospection, like all introspective methods, is selective in various

respects. What subjects will actually report depends on many factors, above
all memory constraints, but also for instance the subjects’ energy and
willingness to report what they recall.
To our knowledge, there are no similar studies using retrospection
for both translation and interpreting, so we are interested in finding out
basic issues, such as the amount of retrospective data that will result and
what the data can tell us. A crucial factor in our research design is how to
define a “similar task” for translation and for interpreting. Our assumption
is that the task itself determines the processing, and that a key element of
the task is its cue, i.e. the source speech/ST used for the task. Therefore, we
decided to give the same ST to interpreting subjects (ISs) and to translating
subjects (TSs).
The amount and contents of retrospective reporting after a task can
be assumed to be influenced by various factors, among them (1) the time
allocated to the original task and (2) the characteristics of the task.
Time for task

As mentioned in Section 2.1, recall is facilitated by short task duration and
recency of the task. It could therefore be assumed that the recency factor
will lead to richer retrospective data from the interpreting than the
translation task. On the other hand, the longer duration of the translation
task can be expected to result in more processing of problems, which could
produce richer retrospective data from this task than from the interpreting
task. Since translating a text (even under time pressure) takes much longer
than interpreting the same text when delivered as a speech, the exact same
conditions do not prevail for both tasks. To make them as similar as
possible, we put time pressure on the translation subjects and gave the two
groups the same conditions regarding the use of aids.
Characteristics of the task

A larger number of problems in the process will presumably lead to a larger
number of reports. A more complete rendition is generally expected in a
translation task than in an interpreting task, which will instead require
condensation, especially in SI. Interpreting also requires a higher degree of
coordination of different cognitive processes than translation; hence
interpreting is a more “intense” process. We are interested to see what
effects this will have on the retrospective reports from the two tasks.
2.7 Problems and strategies in translation and interpreting
Introspective data are often analysed in terms of subjects’ problems and

strategies for solving them. In translation studies, the term strategy is used
in a number of ways, to some extent with overlapping definitions (for
overviews of different notions, see Jääskeläinen 1993). A major distinction
can be made between definitions and classifications based only on textual
features and those based on other kinds of evidence, e.g., TA or other
process-based data.
In this study we apply a definition of strategy which is very much in
accordance with Krings (1986), where the notion of problem is central:
potentiell bewußte Pläne eines Übersetzers zur Lösung konkreter
Übersetzungsprobleme im Rahmen einer konkreten Übersetzungsaufgabe
(Krings 1986: 175) [“a translator’s potentially conscious plans for solving
concrete translation problems in the framework of a concrete translation task”;
Translation: BED]
Although this strategy notion is process-based, the very fact that strategies
are plans for solving problems in the process implies that they will often
have as their result a particular textual feature or pattern. Such patterns

have been subject to different classifications, e.g. the elaborate taxonomy
proposed by Chesterman (1997: 94–112) on the basis of earlier research.
Here, strategies are seen as changes or shifts in the TT, as compared to the
ST.
Strategy notions in interpreting research are similar to those found in
process-oriented translation research. In research on SI, a strategy usually
describes the best way of achieving a goal. Strategies may be both
conscious and unconscious (automatic) (Kalina 1992: 253). Ivanova (1999)
sees strategies as methods used by interpreters in controlled processing of
problems; therefore, a strategy is established on the basis of the
identification of a problem (1999: 179; cf. the definitions given above for
strategies in the translation process). Put differently, the strategy provides
information about the interpreter’s explicit cognitive behaviour.
Furthermore, reports of more general issues in the processing of the text,
such as activation of background knowledge of the domain or of the
speaker, are coded by Ivanova as macro strategies. Ivanova’s model is data-
driven. From retrospection after interpreting by 16 interpreters (eight
novices and eight experienced interpreters) she coded reported processing
problems, as well as instances of monitoring, strategies and macro
strategies. For a detailed overview of the categories, exemplified with our
own data, see the Appendix.
3. Research questions
Our overall research question can be stated as follows: is there a difference

in how much the subjects remember and report on during retrospection
depending on the mode interpreting or translation? More specifically, what,
if any, are the differences in time spent on retrospection, number of words,
number of categories identified (i.e. strategies, macro strategies, instances
of problem processing/identification, and instances of monitoring)?
We also wanted to see whether Ivanova’s scheme developed for
coding retrospection after interpreting (see Appendix) could be applied to
the analysis of retrospection after translating. If so, this would provide us
with a tool for comparing the processes of interpreting and translation.
4. Methods and data
4.1 Participants
Subjects (see Table 1) were recruited among translation students beginning

their second semester at the Institute for Interpretation and Translation
Studies (TÖI) of Stockholm University. Students come to TÖI after at least
one year of undergraduate language studies. All had Swedish as their L1.
Table 1. Subjects
Female Male Years at university Age
Translating subjects: 2 1 3–4 20–30 (n=2)
Therese, Josephine and Felix 40–50 (n=1)
Interpreting subjects: 3 4–5 20–30
Amadeus,3 Kristina and Lisa
4.2 First task – translating or interpreting
The cue for the first task was an English ten-minute speech (09:35) from
the European Parliament. All subjects interpreted or translated it into
Swedish. For the translation task, a transcription of the speech, with
normalized orthography and punctuation, was used. The number of words
was 1093.
Before executing the task, the subjects were given some background
information on the speech and a word list. They were given a few minutes
to consult the information, and decided themselves when to start
interpreting or translating. TSs were told that the ST comprised 52
sentences and were asked to finish the task as quickly as possible. The ST
was presented on the computer screen, one sentence at a time. They were
instructed to translate sentence by sentence and to avoid going back to
sentences that had already been translated for revision.4 Their only aid was
the word list. The writing process was logged with Translog. The
3
Subjects were asked to choose their own fictitious name for the study, and one of our
female subjects chose the male-sounding name Amadeus.
4
To give some ecological validity to this set-up, the subjects were told to imagine that
they were EU translators and that the speech constituting the ST was given and
concurrently transcribed at the very moment of the translation event, the sentences
being delivered to the translator one by one as they were transcribed. The time
pressure was thus imposed by the research situation and the translation brief, but at
the same time, it was self-regulated by the subjects.
researcher was present during the task. The original speech and the
interpreting of the ISs were recorded on a double-track tape recorder.
4.3 Second task – retrospection
The retrospection task was undertaken immediately after the interpreting or

translation task. The cue was a transcript of the ST and the subjects were
asked to go through it, sentence by sentence, trying to recall their thoughts
and actions while they interpreted or translated it and describe these in their
own words. The researcher only intervened to reply to direct questions. The
retrospection was recorded. After the retrospection a shorter debriefing
session (not recorded) was held.
After transcription of the interpreting performance and the
retrospection of all subjects, the retrospective protocols were coded
following Ivanova’s scheme.
5. Results
5.1 Analysis of the retrospective protocols
Below we present some quantitative data from the analysis of the protocols.
Although our coding categories (see Appendix) are taken from Ivanova
(1999), no comparison will be made here with her results since none of her
subject categories are quite comparable to ours.5
5.1.1 Time and word count
Table 2. Length of interpreting, length of retrospection, IS

Participant Number of words Time for Time for Number of words
in interpreting interpreting retrospection in retrospection
task
Amadeus 748 00:09:47 00:36:57 2808
Kristina 721 00:09:28 00:31:16 4381
Lisa 492 00:09:15 00:25:42 4230
Mean 654 00:09:30 00:31:18 3806
5
Cf. however an earlier study with other subjects (Tiselius 2008).
Table 3. Length of translation task, length of retrospection, TS

Participant Number of Time for translation Time for Number of words
words in TT task (duration of retrospection in retrospection
logging)
Therese 1045 01:51:11 00:45:40 5376
Josephine 1028 01:43:33 00:32:05 4171
Felix 1062 01:49:25 00:26:42 3738
Mean 1045 01:48:03 00:34:09 4428
The number of words in the interpretings (see Table 2) is much lower than
in the source speech (1093). Kristina’s and Amadeus’ interpretings
comprise 66.0 % and 68.4 %, respectively, of the number of words in the
source speech, whereas Lisa’s word count is as low as 45.0 % of the source
speech. These figures and the differences between the three subjects are a
first indication of the application of different strategies in answer to
processing problems.
For the TTs produced by TSs (see Table 3), there is very small
variability in the word count, ranging between 94.0 % and 97.1 % of the
ST. These high figures and the narrow range of variation are probably due
to the imposed way of translating sentence by sentence and the instruction
not to go back to earlier sentences for revision.
In time for task, the differences between ISs are very small, as
expected, since the interpreting is done simultaneously and cued by the
recorded speech. More unexpected, given the relatively long ST and the
subjects’ self-regulated time pressure, is the low variability between TSs.
In time for retrospection, there is little difference between the two
groups in the raw data, the time ranging between 25 and 36 minutes for
interpreting subjects and between 26 and 45 for translating subjects. This
measure also includes the researcher’s utterances, so the figures cannot be
taken at face value. The next measure, number of words in retrospection, is
a better indicator of the amount of data from retrospection, since here,
researcher utterances which were longer than feedback signals were
excluded.6 The mean figure for number of words in retrospection after the
interpreting task is slightly lower than after translation, but there is quite a
lot of variation between subjects: the longest retrospection, in terms of
words, is from a TS, the shortest one is from an IS. Of the four
6
When looking at the number of words, it should be noted that most subjects read the
ST aloud during retrospection, but with varying degree of completeness.
retrospections between those extremes, the longer ones are by ISs and the
shorter ones by TSs.
5.1.2 Processing problems
Table 4. Processing problems and categories, IS7

Amadeus Kristina Lisa Number and relative
IS IS IS share
Perception 5 5 1 11 (10.6 %)
Lexical access in 6 2 12 20 (18.3 %)
SL
Comprehension Syntactic 1 0 1 2 (0.2 %)
processing
Text integration 3 9 4 16 (14.7 %)
Text 9 7 0 16 (14.7 %)
comprehension
Translation TL retrieval 9 15 0 24 (23.1 %)
Equivalent 2 2 0 4 (3.9 %)
Simultaneity of SL.TL 1 3 3 7 (6.8 %)
tasks TL delays 4 1 3 8 (7.7 %)
Total 40 44 24 108 (100 %)
Table 5. Processing problems and categories, TS

Therese Josephine Felix Number and
TS TS TS relative share
Perception 1 1 1 3 (1.8 %)
Lexical access in 22 11 15 48 (28 %)
SL
Comprehension Syntactic 1 1 2 4 (2.4 %)
processing
Text integration 5 4 10 19 (11.1 %)
Text 4 0 7 11 (6.3 %)
comprehension
Translation TL retrieval 7 6 17 30 (17.6 %)
Equivalent 18 12 18 48 (28 %)
Simultaneity of SL.TL 2 0 1 3 (1.8 %)
tasks TL delays 2 0 3 5 (3 %)
Total 62 35 74 171 (100 %)
7
For a description of the categories and examples, see Table 1 in the Appendix.
Table 6. Reported processing problems and categories, relative shares, IS and TS

Interpreting subjects Translating subjects
Perception 10.6 % 1.8 %
Lexical access in SL 18.3 % 28 %
Comprehension Syntactic processing 0.2 % 2.4 %
Text integration 14.7 % 11.1 %
Text comprehension 14.7 % 6.3 %
Translation TL retrieval 23.1 % 17.6 %
Equivalent 3.9 % 28 %
Simultaneity of tasks SL.TL 6.8 % 1.8 %
TL delays 7.7 % 3%
Total 100 % 100 %
Below follow a few comments as to the frequencies of the different

subcategories. As could be expected, ISs report a higher frequency of
perception problems than TSs. The category of lexical access is frequent in
both subject groups, but more so for TSs. The higher frequency of this
category in their data is probably caused by the fact that – even under time
pressure – they had (or allowed themselves) more time for processing the
ST at word level. An infrequent problem type, for both subject groups, is
syntactic processing. More important is text integration, with quite similar
frequencies in both groups. The category of text comprehension captures
the role of background knowledge in comprehension. Here, there are
important differences between the two groups, the frequency figures being
more than twice as high for ISs. This may be a consequence of the fact that
a translator may produce a very literal translation if in doubt of the exact
text meaning, whereas this is probably much less of an option in SI.
The category target language retrieval is an important problem type,
with small differences between the groups. For TSs the category equivalent
is overall the most frequent one, alongside with lexical access. For ISs,
however, it is an infrequent category. These differences must be assumed to
reflect the differences in time pressure: ISs, especially inexperienced ones
as these, simply do not have time to consider different target-language
options, whereas for TSs, this appears to be an important part of the
process.
The two subcategories in simultaneity of tasks constitute, as
expected, a rather important problem type for ISs, but not for TSs, who had
better possibilities to control the different processes involved, since their
time pressure was self-regulated.
5.1.3 Monitoring observations

In monitoring observations (Tables 7 to 9), just as in processing problems,
TSs report a higher number of instances.
Table 7. Reported monitoring categories, IS8

Amadeus Kristina Lisa Number and relative
IS IS IS share
Translation 2 6 4 12 (18.2 %)
Inner speech 0 0 1 1 (1.5 %)
Time 2 0 0 2 (3 %)
Monitoring Internal commentary 1 4 2 7 (10.7 %)
Mood 8 15 16 39 (59.0 %)
Id (non-analysed 3 2 0 5 (7.6 %)
problems)
Total 16 27 23 66 (100 %)
Table 8. Reported monitoring categories, TS

Therese Josephine Felix Number and relative
TS TS TS share
Translation 24 6 8 42 (48.8 %)
Inner speech 7 4 2 13 (15.1 %)
Time 0 0 1 1 (1.2 %)
Monitoring Internal commentary 0 0 3 3 (3.5 %)
Mood 2 11 1 14 (16.3 %)
Id (non-analysed 3 7 3 13 (15.1 %)
problems)
Total 39 28 16 86 (100 %)
Table 9. Reported monitoring observations and categories, relative shares, IS and

TS
Interpreting subjects Translating subjects
Translation 18.2 % 48.8 %
Inner speech 1.5 % 15.1 %
Time 3% 1.2 %
Monitoring Internal commentary 10.7 % 3.5 %
Mood 59.0 % 16.3 %
Id (non-analysed problems) 7.6 % 15.1 %
Total 100 % 100 %
The frequencies for the subcategories differ a great deal between the two
groups, most noticeably in the categories Monitoring/Translation and
Monitoring/Mood. Monitoring/Translation contains reports of ascertaining
8
For a description of the categories and examples, see Table 2 in the Appendix.
the accuracy of a translation equivalent in comparison with the ST; its

lower frequency in IS protocols is probably a consequence of the time
constraints. The monitoring category Mood is much more frequent in IS
protocols, accounting for 59 % of all monitoring, vs. only 16.3 % in TS
protocols. We conclude that, at least for untrained subjects, SI is a highly
emotional task.
5.1.4 Strategies
The next step in the analysis involved identifying those strategies which are
mentioned in the protocols as responses to reported problems (outlined in
Table 3 in the Appendix). Furthermore, in contrast to Ivanova (1999), we
also show the numbers of what we call isolated strategies, which we define
as strategies not related to a report of a processing problem or instance of
monitoring. Tables 10 and 11 present the figures for all reported strategies.
Furthermore, macro strategies (Section 2.7) are shown in Tables 14 and 15.
Table 10. Strategies with reported processing problems (PP) or monitoring (M)
and isolated strategies (IS)
Interpreting Subject Amadeus/IS Kristina/IS Lisa/IS Total

Strategies with PP 12 28 21 61
Strategies with M 2 4 4 10
Isolated Strategies 3 3 8 14
Total 17 35 33 85
Table 11. Strategies with reported processing problems (PP) or monitoring (M)
and isolated strategies (TS)
Translating Subject Therese/TS Josephine/TS Felix/TS Total

Strategies with PP 45 17 17 79
Strategies with M 2 3 4 9
Isolated Strategies 0 4 3 7
47 24 24 95
There is a difference in raw figures between TSs and ISs. However, the
high figure for TSs is due to the extensive reporting of only one TS.
Reports on strategies for monitoring are very similar in the groups. When it
comes to isolated strategies, ISs report more. This may again be due to the
cognitive load of the task, resulting in recall of the strategy but not of the
processing problem leading to the strategy.
Table 12. Reported strategies in response to processing problems, IS.9

Processing Amadeus/Kristina/Lisa
Problems
S Sum Rest Cr Over- D Expl Acc Total
gen
Perception 0/0/2 1/2/0 5
Lexical 0/0/2 0/0/4 1/0/0 7
access
in SL
Comprehension Syntactic 0/0/1 0/0/1 2
processing
Text 1/1/2 1/0/0 0/3/2 0/2/0 12
integration
Text com- 0/0/1 0/1/0 2/3/0 0/1/0 8
prehension
Translation TL retrieval 1/3/0 0/6/0 10
Equivalent 0/1/0 0/1/0 0/1/0 3
Simultaneity SL, TL 1/2/4 7
TL delays 0/1/0 4/0/2 7
Total 1 0 1 10 2 35 0 12 61
Table 13. Reported strategies in response to processing problems, TS

Processing Therese/Josephine/Felix
Problems
S Sum Rest Cr Over- D Expl Acc Total
gen
Perception 0/1/1 2
Lexical 1/0/0 1/0/0 7/4/1 4/0/0 2/0/0 3/1/3 27
access in SL
Comprehension Syntactic 1/1/1 3
processing
Text 1/1/0 1/1/0 0/0/1 1/1/0 7
integration
Text com- 1/0/0 1/0/0 0/0/1 3
prehension
Translation TL retrieval 0/0/1 1/2/0 1/0/1 1/0/0 0/0/3 3/2/2 17
Equivalent 1/0/0 4/0/0 1/0/1 1/0/0 5/3/1 17
Simultaneity SL, TL 2/0/0 2
TL delays 1/0/0 1
Total 2 2 8 17 10 12 1 27 79
9
For a description of the categories, explanations of abbreviations, and examples of the
strategies, see Table 3 in the Appendix.
In Tables 12 and 13, only those strategies that are reported in relation to the
problem category to which they are applied as a solution are presented. All
participants report a wide array of strategies. Again, TSs seem to recall a
larger number of strategies related to processing problems. As can be
expected, the most frequently reported strategy for ISs is Deletion whereas
for the TSs, it is Compromise, probably due to the imposed time pressure
of the task and the lack of aids.
Table 14. Macro strategies, IS10

Macro strategy Amadeus/IS Kristina/IS Lisa/IS Total
Knowledge about the speaker (Sp) 0 0 0 0
Pre-activation of relevant domain 1 0 0 1
knowledge (pre-act)
General characteristics of the SL text (text) 2 0 0 2
Use of general interpreting/ translating 2 1 2 5
technique (technique)
Use of interpreting/translating aids (aid) 2 1 1 4
Total 7 2 3 12
Table 15. Macro strategies, TS

Macro strategy Therese/TS Josephine/TS Felix/TS Total
Knowledge about the speaker (Sp) 0 0 0 0
Pre-activation of relevant domain 1 0 0 1
knowledge (pre-act)
General characteristics of the SL text 1 2 1 4
(text)
Use of general interpreting/ translating 0 1 0 1
technique (technique)
Use of interpreting/translating aids 0 0 0 0
(aid)
Total 2 3 1 6
Tables 14 and 15 show the reported activation of macro strategies during

the task. The fact that ISs have a higher total is solely due to the fact that IS
Amadeus reports many instances of macro-strategy activation. This could
be a result of individual divergence.
10
For a description of the categories, explanations of the abbreviations, and examples of
the macro strategies, see Table 4 in the Appendix.
5.1.5 Informativeness of the retrospective protocols

We now relate the number of words in the retrospections to the number of
instances of reported categories for each subject, i.e. problems, strategies,
and monitoring. By calculating the number of reported instances for each
subject per 100 words, we obtain an indicator of the informativeness or
richness of the protocols. A higher figure indicates a protocol with a higher
degree of informativeness.
Table 16. Words in retrospection and number of reported category instances per
100 words, IS
Participant Number of words Total number of Number of reported category
in retrospection reported instances per 100 words of
instances retrospection
Amadeus/IS 2808 80 2.84
Kristina/IS 4381 107 2.44
Lisa/IS 4230 81 1.91
Mean 3806 89 2.39
Table 17. Words in retrospection and number of reported category instances per
100 words, TS
Participant Number of words Total number of Number of reported category
in retrospection reported instances per 100 words of
instances retrospection
Therese/TS 5376 149 2.78
Josephine/TS 4171 88 2.10
Felix/TS 3738 114 3.05
Mean 4428 117 2.64
There are important individual differences here. The small amount of data
does not permit us to draw any definite conclusions. Interestingly, the two
protocols with the smallest number of words (Amadeus and Felix) are the
most informative, in this sense. However, it could be that subjects’ own
retrospective style also determines to what extent the retrospection
becomes informative.
5.2 Triangulating with process data
The subjects studied here on the whole all report the same types of
processing problems although some of the problems are more frequent in
either TSs or ISs. Furthermore, the subjects make use of the same
strategies, although with different frequencies.
The next step in the analysis will involve triangulating data from the
protocols with process data. Evidence of processing problems are found in
the interpretings, for instance in the form of pauses, omissions in the TT,
repairs, hesitations, false starts, and talking speed. In the log files, long
pauses and revisions potentially indicate problems in the translation
process. Evidence of application of strategies is found in the textual
patterns of the TT.
The strategies reported will be compared with the actual textual
solutions. Some preliminary analyses show certain discrepancies between
reported strategies and actual solutions in the text or in the utterances, in
the data from all six subjects. We have found instances of Reporting a
strategy vs. no evidence of strategy found in the TT, and of Reporting one
strategy vs. TT gives evidence of another strategy. There are also examples
where the subject reports a strategy for a particular sentence, but the TT
shows that it was actually applied in another sentence.
6. Discussion
Our subjects performed an interpreting or a translation task, based on the

same ST. Retrospection after the task yielded very similar data for the two
groups, both with respect to the amount of data and the number of reported
instances of problems, strategies and monitoring. Thus, a cautious
conclusion, without having tested significance, is that there are no clear
differences in the amount of retrospective data between interpreting and
translation subjects.
It appeared that the coding categories could easily be applied to data
from retrospection after translation, although some of the categories of the
original model could benefit from a more fine-tuned subcategorization.
This is especially true for the problems in the translation category, where
TSs report a variety of problem types, which could not quite be captured by
the categorization. The differences in frequencies between TSs and ISs

were expected in view of previous knowledge of translation and
interpreting processes. All in all, Ivanova’s categories seem to be
applicable.
Ivanova (1999) deals only with strategies in connection with reported
problems. In this article we partly followed that model, but, as stated
above, we also found reports of strategies without any problem report, or in
connection with monitoring observations. Furthermore, there is the issue of
unreported strategies, where we deduce the application of a strategy on the
basis of textual evidence only. It seems necessary to take such cases into
account as well.
Retrospection can be validated as a research method through
triangulation with process data. A high degree of correspondence between
reports and process data would point to the validity of retrospective data. If
a subject reports a problem in a particular sentence, evidence of a problem
in the processing of that sentence would confirm the report; similarly, if a
subject reports applying a certain strategy, textual evidence of that strategy
would confirm the report. This can frequently be observed in our data, but
there are also cases of discrepancies. There may be a number of
interpretations for this. A divergence between problem report and problem
indicators in the process does not necessarily mean that the retrospective
report is inaccurate since it can be impossible to determine from process
data exactly when a particular problem was experienced by a subject.
In the case of strategies, matters are different. If a strategy is
reported, but no textual evidence is found, the report is in some respect
inaccurate. The subject may have considered this strategy, but never
executed it. The same would apply if one strategy is reported, but another is
applied. In that case, the first strategy may have been considered, but not
executed, and the subject may have forgotten both this and the fact that
another strategy was actually executed. The report would thus be both
incomplete and inaccurate. Furthermore, the TT may well contain textual
patterns which would be classified as strategies from a textual point of
view, but which are not reported as such, with or without a connection to a
processing problem. Such unreported strategies were quite frequent in the
interpreting data analysed in an earlier paper (Tiselius 2006). Such cases
could either be due to incomplete retrospection or to automatized

processing.
Even from these very preliminary analyses, it is clear that
retrospective data cannot be taken as sole evidence for cognitive processes
or strategy use. However, it can yield interesting results when combined
with other methods or as part of triangulation.
We must emphasize that the data presented derive from students with
little or no experience. Currently more data are being collected from
subjects with more experience in translation and interpreting. We will
compare data from novices at a more advanced stage and experienced
subjects with the data from the subjects presented here, and also with the
results in Ivanova (1999). It is our hope that this will provide more
information both about the differences and the similarities between novices
and experienced subjects, but also between interpreters and translators, and
finally give a solid tool for studies using retrospection.
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Appendix
Table 1. Processing problems. Classification according to Ivanova (1999)

Processing problems (PP) Examples from interpreters Examples from translators
Perception (P) Problems with I didn’t have time to catch In our midst – now that I
hearing that it was tobacco related read it, I did not recognize
deaths. (8/Amadeus) it, so I don’t know
(9/Therese)
Lexical access Failure to access I said tb but I’m not sure I don’t know what tb is, so
in SL (L) meaning of a SL what it means (8/Amadeus) then – (9/Therese)
chunk, which has
been identified as
familiar
Syntactic Failure to This is difficult, when they Or maybe the whole
processing recognize syntax start with that they say sentence was a little bit
(Syn) patterns ‘which’, which, like you complicated, that you had
start having those to – change around a little
subordinate phrases and bit (2/Therese)
Comprehension
so on, that is difficult

(15/Amadeus)
(C/)
Text integration Difficulties in It’s like you understand I didn’t know that ‘unsafe’
(TC/integ/) constructing a what it’s all about, but you – what they were refering
coherent miss certain details (21- to, if it is the cigarrettes
representa-tion for 22/Amadeus) are dangerous or that,
SL chunks well. (26/Therese)
Text Comprehension Yes, ‘community’ again I And I thought, as I read
comprehension difficulties due to became like confused over ‘framework convention’ I
(TC/bgkn) lack of background what is com- which thought that it was some
knowledge community (47/Amadeus) kind of meeting or almost
conference. But then I
started thinking, con-
vention, that is more like –
it’s about something else
and then maybe ‘ongoing’
aren’t the right words
(47/Therese)
TL retrieval Problems in I got stuck in this, that is ‘I ‘Public health’ I don’t
(TLr) rendering a SL must here compliment’, know – I didn’t write
chunk in TL you know, I thought, oh!, ‘folkhälsan’ (public
how should you put that health) I think – well,
anyway, I’m a bit
Translation (Tr/)
(10/Amadeus)
uncertain of how it should
be translated. (3/Therese)
Equivalent Problems in I was thinking about And a couple of times I
(eqv) selecting an whatever that is called in hesitated – ‘tobacco
appropriate Swedish, I considered products’, if it was better
equivalent when guidelines or descriptions. to write tobacco products
there is a choice (37/Amadeus) or tobacco goods
(35/Therese)
Processing problems (PP) Examples from interpreters Examples from translators
(SL, TL) Problems due to Then it was too many Since I didn’t want to take
high SL input rate words, sort of, like terms, too much time I think that
in relation to ‘tobacco advertising’ I did it fairly simply.
interpreter’s own ‘sponsorship’, so I don’t
Simultaneity of tasks (Sim/)
(31/Therese)
output rate know what I said.
(45/Amadeus)
TL delays (TL Delays in TL You know, I heard this but And that is such a thing
delays) product due to I didn’t get it out, where you could have
translation. everything that is written come up with something
here. It was really difficult better, if you had reflected
to, you know, use these two some more on it.
processes at the same time, (9/Therese)
to listen and understand
and then speak, it was like
a catch or an obstacle.
(10/Amadeus)
Table 2. Monitoring observations (Ivanova 1999)

Monitoring (M/) Examples from Interpreters Examples from Translators
Translation Ascertaining accuracy Well, I thought I was almost ‘Fill many of the gaps’ – I think I
(tr) of translation at the saying ‘ tbc’ but then I wrote fill many of the gaps. And
conceptual level thought no he only said tb. then su- well it feels very
against an ST (8/Amadeus) colloquial in Swedish, but I still
representation thought that it was OK.
(5/Therese)
Inner speech Verification of the TL And it’s the same syntax so it You dont’t usually say the
monitoring message against TL is easy, isn’t it, to just European Union, but I think I
(insp) rules prior to transfer it directly to wrote it anyway, because I
articulation Swedish so that becomes thought that it was in a text, you
easy. (45/Lisa) see, and it doesn’t do any harm,
does it, to write it out sort of.
(13/Therese)
Time (tm) Awareness of the It was many such details that Because I thought – just this
timing relative to the you got stuck on but it’s like about time pressure (1/Felix)
TL production I have taken them all in, all
those words in between but it
was so fast. (4/Amadeus)
Internal Affective commentary I thought it was funny with I thought that was a little bit
commentary to ST/ST producer ‘gaps’ because I just felt that vaguely put in the source text
(int. comm.) there were gaps all over my there. (34/Felix)
own interpretation.
(5/Amadeus)
Mood Emotive self- Oh well, here it started to And here I had begun to tire a
evaluation of feel good when he was little bit too- (44/Therese)
performance beginning to round up.
(45/Amadeus)
Id Non-analyzed Yes this was also too ‘the spectre of job losses’ – I
problems complicated (15/Amadeus) think I changed quite a bit there,
because it was a little bit
difficult. (27/Therese)
Table 3. Strategies (Ivanova 1999)

Strategy code Brief description Examples Examples from translators
(SC/) fromiInterpreters
Selection (S) Selection of one SL chunk I think I only said the I wrote ‘förordning’ although
for further processing date and nothing else I became somewhat uncertain
because it is more (34/Kristina) whether that perhaps means
informationally or something very specific, legal,
pragmatically salient which would be wrong in this
case, so I don’t know.
Summariza- Rendering the gist of a SL The only thing I got was I did a merge of ‘serious’ and
tion (Sum) segment that I took a quick ‘debiliating’ [sic] and wrote
glance and saw ‘court life threatening diseases
of justice’ (46/Kristina) (8/Therese)
Restructuring Changing the original Here I did not hear the The whole sentence was a
(Rest) syntactic structure of a SL Greeks, but I heard the little bit complicated maybe,
segment (usually by trans- Germans and that made that you had to – rearrange a
posing clauses or segments everything clear… so I bit. (2/Therese)
within the clause), in order had to re-arrange the
to improve the expres-sion structure. (Ivanova,
in TL, or anticipa-tion of N16)
problems.
Creative Compensating for missing But you miss some I was a little but unsure of
Interpretation information by guessing on details, so sometimes what ‘manufactured’ actually
(Cr) the basis of previous you take a guess and meant, I wrote is offered for
knowledge. maybe you render it in a sale. (24/Therese)
wrong way but you
want to give it some
context anyway.
(21/Amadeus)
Overgeneraliz Rendering an aspect of ST So I probably did some Here it was ‘descriptor’ that I
ation (eg a lexeme) by selecting a simpler version of it didnt’t really recognise,
(Overgen) more abstract, hence less (21/Amadeus) although I think I wrote
committing representation in description because that was
TL. close anyway. (35/Therese)
Deletion (D) Omitting SL chunks because It just disappeared So I skip mentioning who it is.
of time constraints without completely. (10/Therese)
reference to their semantic (1/Amadeus)
or pragmatic role.
Explication Explicitly expressing I added ‘associated Because it feels as if you hear
(Expl.) information implied in the members’, although I tobacco goods more often,
ST. did not hear it then, although then I also thought
because it seemed that here we are talking about
logical that if they are the products and not primarily
negotiating with them, the product as goods, so
they have to be therefore I think I kept
associated members product. (35/Therese)
(Ivanova, N11)
Compromise Lower the acceptability But then I thought no he I was wondering whether ‘a
(Acc) standards for a TL only said ‘tb’. qualitative step forward’
production in order to (8/Amadeus) really was a good thing, to say
minimize processing costs. qualitative, but I couldn’t
come up with a better
substitute so I took it.
(3/Therese)
Table 4. Macro strategies (Ivanova 1999)

Macro strategy Example from interpreters Example from translators
Knowledge about the It was always at the back of my –
speaker (Sp) mind that this person is a native
speaker and has a strange usage.
(Ivanova, E4, p. 184)
Pre-activation of relevant So I thought this was so terribly ’Cause it was in the back of my
domain knowledge (pre-act) important at the very end to, mind that it would come up this
because that is what this is all about thing with ‘light’, that you are not
like their attempt to reduce the allowed to call cigarrettes that
injuries of smoking (50/Amadeus) anymore (37/Therese)
General characteristicts of I thought it was good with these, it Yes – this is of course a rather
the SL text (text) is good with those adverbs and or heavy part of the text, so it is very
such words, like ‘importantly’ and important that it gets right.
‘recently’ and I know that it was (14/Josephine)
something more, ‘finally’, it is good
’cause then you have something to
hang on to, sort of (24/Amadeus)
Use of general That I sort of thought, yes but now I –
interpreting/translating won’t bother about what I don’t
technique (technique) have before, just take this sentence,
and tried to pull myself together a
little bit then (37/Kristina)
Use of The only thing I got was that I took …I quite often use ‘NE’ and other
interpreting/translating aids a quick glance [at the word list, our dictionaries to sort of find
(aid) comment]and saw ‘court of justice’ synonyms that may be suitable
(46/Lisa) (2/Josephine)
Using process studies in translator training:
self-discovery through lousy experiments*
Anthony Pym
Abstract
One of the justifications for research on translation processes is that it will be

of use in the training of translators. Very little work, however, has been done
on the actual ways in which research can be used in training. This article
explores the most direct mode of application, where actual process
experiments are carried out in the classroom. Three such experiments are
reported on: one on the use of online machine translation, another on
translator styles, and a third on the effects of time pressure. The quantitative
and qualitative results of the experiments indicate that this approach can be
highly effective in stimulating students to find out about their own translating,
and rather less than effective as a means of producing valid research findings.
The direct use of research in the classroom should thus be considered of
qualitative interest to the individual student rather than quantitatively valid as
a way of producing knowledge of the general.
1. Introduction
Knowledge on translation processes, as opposed to translation products, has

grown in recent years thanks to the use of think-aloud protocols, keystroke
recording, eye tracking, and other methods. The research done at the
Copenhagen Business School has played a leading role in this development,
and Professor Arnt Lykke Jakobsen has been a major creative force behind
that innovative work. Here we cannot pay adequate homage to his leadership
by adding anything significant to the stock of knowledge about translation
136 Anthony Pym
processes; our role is merely to suggest one way in which process research
might find a use in the training of translators.
Empirical work can be applied to the training situation in several
flavors. An exemplary mode would be the TransComp project to study
students’ progress longitudinally (Göpferich 2009), which will give
information on long-term learning processes and might thus justify a
developmental model of competencies. A simpler and more direct mode of
attack is to review all experiments comparing novices and professionals on a
wide range of performance variables (the body of research is already
considerable), to collect the significant differences, and to organize those
differences in terms of a set of learning objectives or competencies. After all,
if we can say what the differences are between novices’ and professionals’
performances, then we can presumably say what students need to be trained
in, albeit without information on sequencing. A third procedure, far more
direct and perhaps of more limited applicability, is to have students engage in
rough experiments as part of the training process itself, both as a means of
self-discovery and as an approach to learning about research. This third mode
of application (there are no doubt others) is what we report on here.
We are by no means the first to venture down this path. Juliane House
(1986, 2000) long ago pointed out that having students translate in pairs or
small groups (―translation in and as interaction‖) was not just good for think-
aloud protocol research – it was good for the students’ learning processes as
well. Fabio Alves (2005) reports on the use of Translog in the classroom,
detailing a series of activities where each cycle of translation–analysis–
discussion accounted for some 10 credit hours. And then there are many
authors who point out the benefits of process-based activities, focusing not
just on what students write but also on how they go about making decisions.
The kinds of experiments that we report on here are different from those
antecedents in several important respects. Like House, we wanted to
encourage talk between students, but we were not prepared to devote class
time to recording and analyzing protocols – the talking and reporting had to be
one-off and quick. Like Alves, we wanted students to look at their translating
critically and to develop a meta-discourse of some kind, but we were not able
Using process studies in translator training 137
to spend 10 hours putting students at ease with Translog, nor another 10 hours
per translation plus analysis. Finally, perhaps like all good teachers, we could
have mobilized a battery of tricks to raise awareness of complex decision-
making processes, but in this case we especially wanted the tasks to look and
feel like empirical research. Slick, quick, and yet empirical. The reasons for
these desiderata lie in our particular institutional setting.
2. Three experiments
2.1. The institutional setting
The experiments we are about to present come from the 2008/09 Translation
Practicum course for second-year Masters students at the Graduate School of
Translation, Interpretation and Language Education at the Monterey Institute
of International Studies in California. The Monterey Masters programs are
highly focused on the training of top-flight professionals, and they are very
expensive, as some students do not hesitate to point out. On the basis of
economics alone, each class has to be justified as progress toward a
professional goal. Any methodology that requires 10 credit hours per
translation would obviously be a very hard sell. Hence our interest in
relatively quick tasks, with a special emphasis on students being able to
discover something as a result of each class. But why then our concern with
interaction? And why the empirical?
The general aims of the Practicum course, described in the handbook,
were to make the students 1) self-critical of their translation processes, and 2)
aware of the contributions of new technologies to the actual act of translating.
However, the non-official aims were perhaps more interesting.
The Monterey Masters courses are structured around separate language
programs, which means that the students in different groups rarely have the
chance to interact with each other in translation or interpreting classes. For
example, the Korean students (all from Korea) tend not to find out how any of
the other students translate, nor vice versa. One of the social and pedagogical
aims of the course was thus to make students aware of their different cultural
backgrounds and their quite different approaches to translation. Students had
138 Anthony Pym
to start talking with students, as should happen in any humanistic education in

an intercultural context. Hence the need for interactive tasks.
At the same time, the translation and interpreting courses at Monterey
have traditionally been based on a model where excellent practicing
professionals teach small groups of excellent students, as a kind of
institutionalized apprenticeship. That model requires no extensive translation
theory, no translation research, and not much technology. However, the
institute’s gradual merger with Middlebury College has required that this
approach undergo a process of ―academization‖ (a term mistrusted by most
professional translators and interpreters). This basically means looking at
theory and academic investigation, as well as at the professional practice of
professors – the Masters are also supposed to train students in the basics of
research. That is, at the very moment when European university education is
moving toward the criteria of professional training, Monterey has been trying
to move toward the academy. Hence the special concern with meta-discourse
and empirical methodology.
The class group comprised 19 students from different language
programs (7 Chinese, 5 Korean, 1 Japanese, 6 French). The Japanese
―student‖ was actually a fellow teacher auditing the course. The instructor was
fluent in no Asian language and was thus in a highly anomalous pedagogical
situation from the outset. How can you help students learn about their
translating when you do not know their languages? ―Didactic translation‖
exercises were obviously excluded; some kind of peer-based activity was
going to be needed; this would have to be a course based on students
discovering things among themselves.
Further, these students were from extremely diverse backgrounds: some
had had several years of training as translators; others had previous degrees in
science; still others had work experience in the military or in IT. Some had
strong bilingual language skills (they could choose between two L1s in the
activities); about half the students had English as their L1; others still had
some problems with English grammar. For any researcher interested in
controlling variables and getting great p-values, this would be the group from
hell. On the other hand, all the students were intelligent and highly motivated,
and their diversity might yet be representative of the many kinds of situations
that translator training can involve.
Following the first contact hour (described below), the students selected
the aspects of translation processes that they wanted to work on. The course
was then structured around that selection, with experiments on machine
translation, translation memories (Wordfast, Trados), reviewer styles,
translator styles, spoken vs. written translation, and translation procedure
analysis, along with non-experimental topics such as ethical problem-solving
and a survey of pay scales in different countries. The second half of the
Practicum, not described here, looked at translation products, with a particular
emphasis on corpus analysis.
Below we present reports on three of the experiments: the very first one,
then one from Week 7, and another from Week 8.
2.2. Experiment 1: the Google challenge
The first experiment was conducted in the first hour of the first class, with all
attendant confusion and technological hitches. The aim was basically to
demonstrate to students that 1) these classes were going to be practical but
quite different from their other translation classes, and 2) there were things
that they could discover about themselves and about technology. Each
language group was divided into two (giving a multilingual Group A and a
multilingual Group B). The class instructions were as follows:
Please translate the following text for publication in an online dictionary of technical terms,
to be used as a general reference source.
Group A should translate just using Internet reference sources.
Group B should feed the text through Google Translate

(http://www.google.com/translate_t#), then review and modify the output.
Since we are interested in how long these processes take, please work at what you consider
your normal pace. You will be stopped after 12 minutes.
Your source text is as follows:

140 Anthony Pym
3D printing
The making of parts and products using a computer-driven, additive process, one layer at a
time. 3D printing builds plastic and metal parts directly from CAD drawings that have been
cross sectioned into thousands of layers. It provides a faster and less costly alternative to
machining (cutting, turning, grinding and drilling solid materials).
Used for making both prototypes as well as final products, 3D printing evolved from the
“rapid prototyping” industry, pioneered by Chuck Hull of 3D Systems in the mid-1980s.
Concept, Prototype and Final Product
Capable of making a part from scratch in just hours, 3D printing is used to create models
to determine if a design meets the customer’s concept and expectations. It is also used to
create prototypes of parts to test their form, fit and function with other parts in an
assembly.
The time limit was stipulated as 12 minutes in order to make students work at
a brisk pace, but repeated public extensions were then given so that all
subjects except three finished the text within 25 minutes (presumably under
roughly the same pressure). The only quantitative variable sought was the total
time taken to produce the final translation (i.e. drafting plus self-review). All
the French-program students and two Chinese-program students were working
into their L2, so there was no level playing field. The text was selected so as to
ensure that all students would both understand the subject-matter quickly and
yet need to search for some terminology. Following the translation exercise,
students formed language-specific groups of two or three in which to compare
each MT-based translation with a non-MT based translation into the same
language. Each group then reported orally on the differences between the two
translations.
The general result of this simple experiment was that there was no
significant difference in the time taken with MT and without it, no significant
difference between the language groups (see Table 1), and no systematic
difference between the qualities of the translations as assessed by the students.
The general quantitative message was thus that students were not going to lose
any time by working with MT – so perhaps they should consider how this
mode of work might affect them in the future.
The qualitative findings, reflected in the class discussion, were that 1)
translators into Chinese and Korean (our one Japanese translator escaped from
this activity) generally reacted negatively to the use of MT, even though this
difference is not reflected in the quantitative results (we expected Asian
languages to give worse results because the MT databases were presumably
smaller for those languages), 2) the translators into French appreciated some
of the terminology proposed by Google Translate, 3) all translators
complained about the MT misreading syntax and were generally appalled by
the resulting wild mistranslations, even though this might be one of the
advantages of MT with respect to TM – better a clear mistake than a series of
fuzzy matches you have to think about for a while (see Guerberof 2009).
Table 1. Time in minutes of translations done into indicated target languages

(numbers of subjects in parentheses), comparing use of the Google Translate
machine translation tool (MT) with non-MT translations. The mean for ―all groups‖
is based on all individual scores.
Chinese (7) Korean (5) French (6) All groups SD
With MT 25.0 15.3 21.0 20.37 6.02
Without MT 25.4 16.0 21.5 21.80 7.26
This experiment would not hold up to any sort of analysis if judged as a piece
of empirical science. The standard deviations are enormous: the fastest
subject, a high-tech man working into L1 Korean with MT, took 10 minutes;
two translators, into French and Chinese, took 30 minutes for no obvious
reason, and the all-time slowest, a perfectionist into L2 Chinese with no MT,
took 38 (a long story typical of real life – he had trouble with his laptop, went
to the library to finish the translation, and thus avoided the external pressure
and saved all kinds of face). These individual differences in turn explain the
different times for the various language groups. Further, this was the first time
most of these students had reviewed MT output. With greater experience and
familiarity, their performances in this mode would presumably become
quicker and more standardized. In short, this is not something we would like
to publish as research.
142 Anthony Pym
The experiment did, however, fulfill a definite pedagogical function. At

the very least, students discovered that there are viable technological
alternatives to their traditional modes of translating. The numbers also made
the slower students aware, indirectly and perhaps politely, that their
perfectionist concepts of translation were rather exceptional. More important,
all students discovered that their instructor did not know what the results of
the experiment would be. On this particular frontier, we were all
experimenting.
Following this activity, the group discussed the process variables they
wanted to investigate in the rest of the course. The sequence of lessons was
then put together.
2.3. Experiment 2: translator styles
We now fast-forward to Week 7. Students have been comparing different TMs,

trying out different reviewing technologies, comparing self-reviewing with
peer-reviewing, and have had task-based lessons on TM terminology
management and electronic style sheets. While discussing the different modes
of reviewing, students have been introduced to the concept of translator styles,
including the colorful categories proposed by Mossop (2000: 44): translators
can be ―architects‖ (lots of planning, some reviewing after drafting),
―bricklayers‖ (lots of planning, lots of cleaning up while drafting),
―watercolorists‖ (minimal planning, some reviewing while drafting) or ―oil
painters‖ (minimal planning, lots of reviewing during and after drafting).
We are now ready for some general process analysis, of a simplified
kind that can be carried out in 100 minutes (the work time available in a two-
hour class). Our basic tool here was a simple screen-recording program
(Blueberry’s Flashback system, now called ―Flashback Express‖) that was
available for free and could be mastered in a few minutes. This tool enabled
students to record everything that happened on the screen while they were
translating, then play back their performance, controlling the play-back speed
and counting the time spent on each task. (The tool also allows for voice
recording, but we were not using that option.) Here are the instructions:
Your mission, should you decide to accept:

1. Download and install BB Flashback Player (this should really be done prior to the class).
Deselect ―Capture keystrokes.‖
2. Find a respectable online daily newspaper in your L2 (the language you want to translate
from). Select a lead (i.e. front-page) story for today. Cut about 200 words from the
beginning of that story. (Use Word Count to get the number of words. Select fewer words if
necessary. Select something of similar conceptual length or use your normal word-character
conversion calculation if you are dealing with characters rather than words.) DO ALL OF
THIS VERY QUICKLY.
3. Paste those 200 or so words into a Word document, open a TM, and get ready to translate
them using the TM. There is no real need to use a special memory or glossary for this
exercise.
4. Start BB Flashback. Select RECORD.
5. Translate the text into your L1, doing web searches and reviewing as necessary. Aim to
complete the translation in about 20 minutes (we will allow you 25)—so be professional,
not perfectionist.
6. Have a 10-minute break.
7. Play back your screen recording. Try to keep a track of how many seconds you spent on
the following tasks: a) technical problems, b) reading, comprehending, c) documentation
(web searches), d) translating, drafting, e) reviewing after the drafting (not including the
correction of typos as you type).
8. Upload your translations and the analysis of your time-on-tasks, plus brief answers to the
following questions: a) What kind of translator are you? (Do you plan first, then do the
task, or do you do the task, then make changes?), b) Did any aspect of your translating
surprise you?
All students did all of that in 100 minutes (these are intelligent students). Only
a few had significant technical problems, so those times have been edited out
of the data (percentages have been calculated on the basis of the other tasks
only). The class group on that day included our Japanese colleague but was
missing one Korean and three students from the French program. Irregular
attendance is also a fact of life (and would mess things up for the following
week’s activity, but on we go.) The results are shown in Table 2.
Table 2. Translator styles as indicated in percentages of time spent on tasks

(reading/comprehension, documentation, drafting, post-draft reviewing); letters refer
to the language program in which the student is enrolled (Korean, Chinese,
Japanese, French).
K1 K2 K3 K4 C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7 J1 F1 F2 F3
Reading 9 23 21 17 10 31 50 15 28 23 20 23 28 11 14
Documentation 37 12 27 0 5 9 6 13 17 14 20 13 20 7 6
Drafting 46 58 47 71 67 53 38 52 50 49 45 53 40 82 38
Reviewing 8 7 5 2 18 7 6 20 5 14 15 11 12 0 42
144 Anthony Pym
A major difficulty in this experiment was the attempt to define the separate
tasks in a clear way. As predicted by Mossop’s categories, some students
found that they were revising fragments as they went along, at the end of each
paragraph or as part of the general drafting process. In those cases we simply
asked them to count the total review time as best they could, without insisting
on the ―post-draft‖ criterion. If we were looking for a scientific result, some
special count would have to be made of these intermediary stages of review. In
the class situation, though, it is enough that each student be able to apply their
own consistent criteria. The difficulty of quantifying the review stage actually
became a major topic of discussion at the end of the lesson.
Any good translation teacher will object here that we should not use
newspaper texts, since they are poor representatives of most real-world
translation situations. We are indeed embarrassed by this recourse to
convenience. There were, however, several logics in play: 1) in order to have
all students going into their L1, texts had to be selected in various source
languages, including some unknown to the instructor, 2) these students mainly
find employment in government departments where current events are indeed
material for translation, 3) the use of very recent news would ideally minimize
the differences in prior knowledge of the subject matter – fresh news is
presumably fresh for all, 4) we also reduced the risk that a translation of the
text was already available on the web (as happens with disconcerting
frequency). The text choice was thus supposed to reduce the variables, and
might yet be justified on that score.
As it happened, the results shown in Table 2 betray the weaknesses of
both the classification and the text-selection criteria. Two outliers are shaded
(K2 and F2) because their scores are indeed shady: the screen recording shows
that K2 did a great deal of reviewing while drafting but did not count it at all
(she would change criteria the following week), and F2 confessed that he
chose a subject with which he was exceptionally familiar, and thus ostensibly
required no reviewing and only trivial documentation. Both these cases would
create problems down the line, as we shall see below.
Despite these clear failings in the experiment design, the students’

qualitative self-assessments proved particularly rich and revealing. Six of
them chose to use Mossop’s terms to describe their translation styles, although
none saw themselves as ―bricklayers‖ (the metaphor is indeed hard to grasp).
The following are the parts of the comments that refer to translator styles (here
we have slightly corrected some students’ English, since they were not writing
for publication):
K1: I just assumed I was ―watercolorist‖. The result shows that I am.
K2: I found it interesting to see that I spent so much time revising my text. It was not like I
translated the whole text and then revised it. I revised the text as I was translating.
K3: I think I am an oil painter kind of translator. Actually, I am always trying to plan first
and then start translating, which is what I learned to do. However, I always fail to plan
perfectly.
K4: I read briefly to get the summary of the source text. And then get right into the
translation, even before looking up the words. And then I look up the words and then
revise.
C1: Based on the recording, apparently I don’t plan before translating. I read the text as
quickly as I can, then start to translate segment by segment if I can comprehend.
C2: I think I am an ―architect‖ because I spent the majority of my time on pre-drafting and
minimal time on post-revising.
C3: I plan first and do the task. Before this experiment, I didn’t notice that I spend a lot of
time on comprehending and don’t go back to make changes often. This surprised me a lot.
C4: I’m more of an ―oil painter‖ translator. I typically skim an article for context prior to
translating then end up doing a good deal of the research/glossary building during
translation and a lot of editing after translation.
C5: I prefer to get into the translation right away without previewing the whole article first
and then do the revisions. I can translate quite quickly with the pressure of limited time.
C6: I always do the task first while making changes at the same time. I was a little surprised
that I spent only 37 percent of the time on translating.
C7: I found the watercolorist style best describes the translation job I recorded myself
doing.
146 Anthony Pym
F1: Unless it’s a technical text, I tend to do the task, then make changes.
F2: For this particular text, I was able to translate first, then make changes after because it’s
a topic with which I am somewhat familiar in both languages.
F3: It appears that I am an oil painter at heart, putting minimal work into the planning
stages and significant effort into the revision stage at the end.
When you go from these self-descriptions to the data in Table 2, the concept of
translator styles does make some sense. However, when I try to identify the
styles on the basis of the data alone, nothing statistically significant leaps out
(although I hope someone will prove me wrong). This could indicate that the
time-on-task categories would have to be far more sensitive if they are to
correspond to any ―styles‖ with pretensions to psychological reality. Mossop’s
categories are great for getting students to talk about how they translate, but
they would appear not to have much empirical virtue beyond that.
The students’ comments also contained some revealing self-criticisms:
K1: It was interesting to see how little time I use for comprehending and revising. I get
comments from professors that my accuracy is not good enough that they ask me if I am
paying enough attention to reading. They were right! I should do that more!
K2: I feel that I need to increase my time for revising.
K3: I did not know that I spend such a long time on web searching. But I don’t spend
enough time on revising.
C1: I spent too much time on the technical preparation.
C2: My way of translating seems too slow. I should spend more time on revising.
C4: I think increased use of Multiterm will help speed up the process, especially for
automatically inputting proper names.
F1: I was surprised at how long it took me to do it. And I don’t think my translation is
sufficiently colloquial.
F2: What surprised me most was my typing speed. I know that I do not generally type very
fast because I was never trained in typing properly.
F 3: One basic thing that became obvious was that I make a good number of typos (about 3-
5 every sentence), which I fix immediately.
One student provided an explanation for the results, suggesting that a

particular translator style might correspond to work between unlike languages:
C4: Because of the ordering of information in a Chinese sentence, I have found that it is
safer to get it down in awkward English first then worry about restructuring the English
sentence later, otherwise I risk omitting details at the beginning of long Chinese sentences.
The data do not allow us to confirm any correlation between language pair and
translator style, but the hypothesis remains of interest. Another student found
time for a basic segmentation analysis and a small self-improvement program:
F3: I identified a fairly consistent pattern as I translate: I look at the text (5 seconds), type
the first part of the sentence (10-15 seconds), read the rest of the sentence (5-10 seconds),
and then translate the remainder of the sentence (10-30 seconds). I did not realize that I
start translating before I even read/understand the whole sentence. Sometimes I would have
to retranslate the first part of the sentence, but not all that often. As a side note, I think the
aspect of where the eyes are looking and what the brain is doing during the typing phase is
quite an interesting question too. It seemed that in class I would look at what I was typing
on the screen and think about that before moving on to the next part of the sentence. A very
segmented approach. After class, I wanted to work on a translation while keeping in mind
the issues that came up during this exercise, and I tried focusing on reading ahead and
understanding the second part of the sentence while still typing my translation to the first
part – all while making an effort to eliminate typos too. It was a challenge (which is another
reason I’m pretty sure I hadn’t been doing it much before) but it also felt like my translating
was much more fluid and somewhat faster.
If we are looking for the pedagogical virtues of process analysis, this student’s
comments are about as good as it gets. In fact, all the students’ responses were
generally much better than our research design.
2.4. Experiment 3: time pressure
A week after the above experiment, the group was asked to perform exactly
the same task, but faster and in pairs (two students had to translate the same
text, then compare results in order to get some rough assessment of translation
quality). On the basis of previous research on the time variable, we believed
that most students would be able to work about 25 % or 30 % faster without a
great loss in translation quality. As in the previous experiment, we advertised a
148 Anthony Pym
time limit (actually set at 35 % faster) and then we did not apply it rigorously
(to allow the translations to be completed). Here are the instructions:
Today’s task is the same as last week’s except that you have to go 35 % faster and you will
work in pairs (i.e. two of you will translate the same text). Your mean time last week was
19.2 minutes, so your time for this week is 12.48 minutes. Here are the steps:
1. Form a pair with someone going into your preferred target language.
2. Both of you should find a respectable online daily newspaper in your L2 (the language
you want to translate from). Select a lead (i.e. front-page) story for today. Cut about 200
words, or a rough equivalent in characters, from the beginning of that story. (Use Word
Count to get the number of words. Select fewer words if necessary. Select something of
similar conceptual length if you are dealing with characters rather than words.) DO ALL
OF THIS VERY QUICKLY.
3. Paste those 200 or so words into a Word document, open a TM, and get ready to translate
them using the TM. There is no real need to use a special memory or glossary for this
exercise.
4. Start BB Flashback. Select RECORD.
5. Translate the text into your L1, doing web searches and revising as necessary. Aim to
complete the translation in 12.48 minutes, since that is the time after which you will be
stopped.
6. Have a break.
7. Play back your screen recording. Try to keep a track of how many seconds you spend on
the following tasks: a) technical problems, b) reading, comprehending, c) documentation
(web searches), d) translating, drafting, e) reviewing after the drafting (not including the
correction of typos as you type).
8. Upload your translations and the analysis of your time-on-tasks, plus brief answers to the
following questions: a) Did the faster translator make more mistakes than the slower
translator? b) What differences can you see with respect to the time-on-task analysis you
did last week? c) What recommendations would you give to a translator who wanted to
know how to translate faster without making excessive mistakes?
The mean time for these translations was actually 35.38 % faster than for the
previous exercise, with the slowest translator (C7, a self-described ―water-
colorist‖) showing a gain of 16 %, and the fastest claiming a gain of 58 % (C4,
an ―oil painter‖). The general shifts in percentages per task are shown in Table
3 (student K4 has disappeared because she was not in class).
Table 3. Shifts in percentages of time per task, comparing unpressured translation

with time-pressured translation. Gain shows the percentage by which the faster
translation was faster.
K1 K2 K3 C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7 F1 F2 F3 Totals
Reading +9 -23 +7 +4 -9 -2 0 +8 -9 +16 -13 +5 -8 -16
Doc. -25 +8 -7 +3 0 -1 +9 -17 +2 -8 -15 +9 -4 -47
Drafting +19 -18 0 +11 -10 -1 +7 +14 +21 -5 +21 -14 +26 +71
Reviewing -3 +33 0 -18 +19 +5 -16 -5 -14 -3 +7 0 -14 -8
Gain (%) 31 38 26 41 37 38 58 38 48 16 48 -2 43
The totals for the percentage shifts suggest that speed was achieved by cutting
down on documentation, initial reading, and reviewing. The variation between
the scores for each task is nevertheless extreme. Further, student F2 was
actually slower in this ―fast‖ experiment, since on this occasion he was not
able to choose his favorite subject matter. As mentioned, K2 also messed
things up by deciding to count the reviewing time in a different way. This is
why these two students (K2 and F2) were marked as outliers in the previous
experiment and they have been removed from our comparative analysis of
percentages of time on task (Tables 4 and 5) – their scores do not tell us
anything significant about translation processes as such.
Table 4. Percentages of time on task at unpressured translation speed (experiment 2)

minus outliers.
K1 K3 C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7 J1 F1 F3 Mean SD
Reading 9 21 10 31 50 15 28 23 20 23 28 14 22.6 11.1
Documentation 37 27 5 9 6 13 17 14 20 13 20 6 15.6 9.5
Drafting 46 47 67 53 38 52 50 49 45 53 40 38 48.2 8.0
Reviewing 8 5 18 7 6 20 5 14 15 11 12 42 13.4 10.3
Table 5. Percentages of time on task at pressured translation speed (experiment 3)

minus outliers.
K1 K3 C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7 J1 F1 F3 Mean SD
Reading 18 28 14 22 48 15 36 14 36 8 15 6 21.6 12.8
Documentation 12 20 8 9 5 22 0 16 12 24 5 2 11.2 7.9
Drafting 65 47 78 43 37 59 64 70 40 60 61 64 57.3 12.7
Reviewing 5 5 0 26 11 4 0 0 12 8 19 28 9.8 9.8
The reduced magnitudes of the shifts and the relative standard deviations now
indicate that the students generally gained time by cutting down on
documentation and reviewing, but not so much on reading. The students with
150 Anthony Pym
the highest time gains tend to be those who originally spent the most time on
reading and documentation (the relative ―architects‖), but this is only because
they were the slowest in the first translation. None of this is anything to write
home about. More importantly, none of the students reported that the faster
translation was of significantly worse quality. They were thus generally
prepared to accept that more time does not automatically equal higher quality,
and that all of them could speed up their normal translation processes.
The comments were once again more revealing than the numbers. Here
we give the main observations by each student, indicating in square brackets
those whose previous self-descriptions used one of Mossop’s metaphors:
K1: I spent a lot less time researching. When you have a time limit, your efficiency goes up
and you just focus on the text.
K2: I spent more time on reading and translation compared to last week.
K3 [―oil painter‖] In the timed translation tasks, I focused on understanding the context and
tried to make sentences simple and clear, which in turn helps readers understand with ease.
C1: Generally, both of us spent more time on translating and no time on revising.
C2: This time I spent less time on reading and translating [he increased the percentage of
reviewing].
C3: With time pressure, I didn’t have much time to consider if I had used the right
characters or phrases and some spelling mistakes might be found in this translation.
C4: [―oil painter‖] More [percentage of] time spent on documentation and translation;
significantly less [percentage of] time on revision.
C5: [―oil painter‖] I just caught the rough meaning of the sentences and got to the
translation right away in order to finish the translation before the time limit.
C6: [―oil painter‖] First, I had to speed up the process of translation by reducing the time
spent on documentation and revision. Second, more multitasking work is required in speed
translation, which involves reading, comprehension, web searching, translating and revising
in a single process.
C7: [―watercolorist‖]: With the time pressure, I tried to do as little documentation as

possible. I tried not to look too deeply into the meaning and the implied meaning of a word
and term.
J1: The difference was that I spent a higher percentage of time on ―documentation‖ (word
research) than ―reading‖, compared to last week. What it meant was that, instead of
understanding and translating the text as a part of co-text and context, I use a more word-
for-word strategy. But the text I used this time was on the stock market, and I just did not
know exactly how to phrase terms in my language, which in turn meant looking up a lot of
words in dictionaries and spending a lot of time on documentation.
F1: I spent much less time on documentation this week, and revised while I translated. I
would have liked to have time to finish and go back to some parts that I didn’t feel like I
rendered accurately.
F2: I think I would tell a translator to do as I say and not as I do, as it were, meaning spend
less time researching and possibly less time reading, and just dive right into the text and
start translating it and then make sure to leave some time for revisions.
F3: [―oil painter‖] Looking just at percentages, the proportion of time I spent on translation
in the second week almost doubled, the reading time was nearly halved and revision time
decreased somewhat. In absolute time, though, I think it is interesting that the number of
seconds I spent translating was practically the same in both exercises. That would suggest
that even without a time constraint, I work about as fast as I can during the translation
phase and then use the revision phase to clean everything up. There is, though, the factor of
the reading and comprehension, which during the first week seemed like discrete units but
under time pressure blended much more into the translation phase.
Once again, the students’ assessments seem more astute than our
research design. As C6 and F3 both suggested, the blending of categories
under time pressure does indeed show in the screen recordings but not in our
numbers. Worse, since the in-class discussion was based on percentages rather
than absolute times, there was no real chance to talk about the possibility that
drafting times remained fairly constant, as predicted by F3.
Some students also made a series of recommendations based on their
analysis:
C5: I think the secret of translating faster is not to hesitate for too long before starting to
translate and make revisions afterward so you won’t waste too much time getting stuck on
the phrases you have problems with.
C6: If they really want to speed up their translating process without major meaning shift or
error, they should focus more on reading comprehension and try to be more linguistically
flexible.
152 Anthony Pym
C7: What I recommend is try to cut from the documentation part and the revision part, but
not the reading and comprehending part if the translator wants to make as few mistakes as
possible.
F1: For a person trying to translate quickly, I would say to avoid documentation if at all
possible, and do some revising at the end to revisit those sections that were difficult or
about which there were some uncertainties.
F3: Translate quickly and save time at the end to revise – but set some sort of deadline so
that not too much time is spent revising.
J1: My recommendation is [usually] to do the research ―in the middle of or together with
the translating process‖. But as the results show today, this strategy did not really work out,
so probably translating first and going over your own translation (reviewing afterwards,
including doing some research on uncertain terms) may be better.
Perhaps the only constant in the recommendations is the enhanced awareness

of the review phase and its importance. Two students (C6 and C7), who had
very different translator styles but who discussed this together, nevertheless
recommended more focus on the reading and comprehension phase. Several
different ―ideas for improvement‖ were thus extracted from the exercise, and
the instructor was in no position to say if any of these ideas were more correct
than the others. The students were free to experiment and observe, ideally in
all their future translations.
The final part of this class activity, actually in the following week, was
to have the students read some pages from doctoral research on the time
variable (Jensen 1999; Jensen & Jakobsen 2000), particularly with respect to
the discussion of coping tactics. The students were thus able to read the
research with reference to their own prior experience, and to use the research
to further develop their reflection on that experience. In the process, they
learnt not only about their own translation performance, but about (good and
bad) research designs as well.
3. Conclusions
Although we have presented numbers that look like empirical research, our
purpose has not been to formulate any findings about the translation process.
The only conclusions we could risk are so general as to be banal: the use of
data-based MT need not slow down the translation process; different

translators have different styles; translation can be made faster by reducing the
time spent on documentation, reading, and reviewing. The one hypothesis that
might be of interest – the faster the translation, the greater the blending of
tasks – came from students’ observations rather than from anything in the
research design as such, and that hypothesis could not be tested with this
research design. Under these circumstances, it seems fair to qualify the
experiments as ―lousy‖.
With respect to pedagogical value, however, the use of process research
in the classroom surely deserves a far more positive assessment. The use of
experiments in this way allows students to make direct observations about
their own translating and to draw their own conclusions; students are then in a
position to challenge much of what is commonly said about translation (―don’t
use MT‖, ―the faster you go, the more mistakes you make‖, etc.); they
themselves can make a direct transition from translation analysis to the
reading and applying of research; they can then decide what to look at next,
using research as a set of signposts for their own individual journeys of
discovery; and they can investigate the virtues of different research designs, if
only by experiencing the limitations of some bad designs. At all these steps,
students are made to talk with each other, and only then with the instructor.
Our experience with this approach might also have something to say
about the alternatives mentioned at the beginning of this article. The extreme
variability of translation styles, both within and between the different
language groups, suggests that this has to be taken into account in longitudinal
studies of students’ progress. The tracking of twelve students (as in the
TransComp project, which also studies ten professionals) may well give
twelve individual cases, the generalizability of which will have to be checked.
With respect to the use of process studies to constitute and justify lists of
competencies, since that is what our education systems ultimately want, we
firmly believe that any resulting lists will be better suited to students’ actual
learning procedures than are the existing lists based on translation products,
exam grading criteria, personal opinion, and the weight of tradition. Process-
based lists should definitely include speed, the capacity to distribute effort in
154 Anthony Pym
terms of risk, the use of external resources (both written and human), and the
key role of reviewing. The obvious problem, however, is that any findings that
have been justified on the basis of a fully controlled experimental situation,
with a homogeneous student group, wonderful p-values and clear causal
logics, may then be applied in pedagogical situations that can be extremely
diverse and relatively uncontrolled, both within and between different class
groups. The use of experiments in class might nevertheless allow solid science
(plus a few of the current idealistic pre-set full-control lists of competencies)
to be circumvented to a certain extent: students draw their own conclusions
about their own developing competencies, and the group is relatively free to
chart its own sequence of short-term learning objectives. In short, the use of
experiments can be used to empower the group (as constructivists love to say)
and humanize education (as we prefer to say), rather than impose plans and
rules that we are far from certain about.
On the basis of the above, the direct use of process experiments may be
recommended as a pedagogical exercise, at least in advanced classes where
the various technologies actually work. Although we look forward to the day
when process research will provide a solid basis for our institutionally guiding
lists of competencies (such things cannot be avoided), there is no real need to
wait: much of the exciting stuff can be done right now.
* The author would like to thank Serafima Khalzanova for her perceptive
comments on a previous version of this text, and the translation students at the
Monterey Institute of International Studies for their participation in the
activities.
References
Alves, F. 2005. Bridging the gap between declarative and procedural knowledge in
the training of translators: meta-reflection under scrutiny. Meta 50/4. Available
at http://www.erudit.org/revue/meta/2005/v50/n4/019861ar.pdf. Accessed
August 2009.
Göpferich, S. 2009. Towards a model of translational competence and its
acquisition: the longitudinal study TransComp. In S. Göpferich, A. L. Jakobsen
& Inger M. Mees (eds). Behind the Mind. Methods, Models and Results in
Translation Process Research. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur. 11-37.
Guerberof, A. 2009. Productivity and quality in the post-editing of outputs from

translation memories and machine translation. Localisation Focus 7/1: 11-21.
House, J. 1986. Acquiring translational competence in interaction. In J. House & S.
Blum-Kulka (eds). Interlingual and Intercultural Communication. Tübingen:
Narr.
House, J. 2000. Consciousness and the strategic use of aids in translation. In S.
Tirkkonen-Condit & R. Jääskeläinen (eds). Tapping and Mapping the
Processes of Translation and Interpreting: Outlooks on Empirical Research.
Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 149-162.
Jensen, A. 1999. Time pressure in translation. In G. Hansen (ed.) Probing the
Process in Translation: Methods and Results. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.
103-119.
Jensen, A., & Jakobsen, A. L. 2000. Translating under time pressure: an empirical
investigation of problem-solving activity and translation strategies by non-
professional and professional translators. In A. Chesterman, N. Gallardo San
Salvador & Y. Gambier (eds). Translation in Context. Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: Benjamins. 105-116.
Mossop, B. 2000. The workplace procedures of professional translators. In A.
Chesterman, N. Gallardo San Salvador & Y. Gambier (eds). Translation in
Context. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 39-48.
Part II
COMPUTER
ASSISTANCE IN
PROCESS RESEARCH
Adding value to data in translation process research:
1
the TransComp Asset Management System
Susanne Göpferich
Abstract
This article focuses on how data collected in translation process research

can be made re-usable and how results can be made verifiable. These are
major issues in translation process research since, in the past, data
collected in investigations into translation processes have in most cases
not been made available to the scientific community, with the consequence
that findings cannot be reproduced and verified and that the data cannot
be re-used in other investigations.
In an attempt to solve this problem, a case will be made for using
Asset Management Systems to make translation process data accessible on
the Internet. Asset Management Systems are electronic systems for storing,
archiving, annotating, analysing and displaying digital resources of any
type. The advantages and functionality of these systems will be described
both from the perspective of research and of translation pedagogy. As an
example of an Asset Management System, the one developed for
TransComp with its specific functionality will be presented. One notable
feature of this AMS is the option of linking transcripts to the
corresponding sections in the sound or video files, so that, for example, a
section of the video file can be replayed by clicking on the corresponding
section in the transcript.
1 TransComp is a longitudinal study which investigates the development of translation

competence in twelve students of translation over a period of three years and
compares it with that of ten professional translators with at least ten years of
professional experience in translation/interpretation. It is funded by the Austrian
Science Fund (FWF) as project No. P20908-G03 (September 2008–August 2011). For
a detailed project description, see Göpferich (2009).
160 Susanne Göpferich
1. The problem: data documentation and availability
The data collected in studies on translation processes are usually diverse

and voluminous. Apart from the source texts and the translation
assignments, which are of interest to researchers who wish to use them
with other subjects in comparative studies, they may include the target
texts produced and the evaluators‟ comments on them, notes taken by the
subjects during the translation process, questionnaires filled in by them
after the translation, project files (e.g. those used in the key-logging
software Translog, Jakobsen 1999), log files, screen recordings, webcam
recordings, video recordings, eye-tracking data, sound files with verbal
data, and transcripts of what the subjects uttered and did during the
translation process.
Owing to restrictions of length, most publications do not include
these data, especially the complete transcripts of the translation processes
on which they are based. As a consequence, the results cannot be
reproduced and it is impossible to verify whether the categories used in the
analyses have been operationalized in such a way that objective or at least
inter-subjective results are obtained. This is particularly unfortunate in the
case of larger-scale studies such as Krings (1986, 2001), Jääskeläinen
(1999), Englund Dimitrova (2005), and Hansen (2006), all of which have
involved considerable effort in data collection and transcription. Another
disadvantage of not making the data accessible to the scientific community
is that often these data have only been analysed with regard to certain
criteria although they could form a useful corpus for other studies as well.
2. The solution: Asset Management Systems (AMS)
By making data accessible on the Internet, the drawbacks outlined above

can easily be overcome. Provided that adequate server capacity is
available, there are no length restrictions. In printed publications, reference
can be made to the Internet resources if they are stored in an appropriate
manner. Furthermore, process data that are stored online can be searched
Adding value to data in translation process research 161
easily if they are provided with detailed meta-data which can be used as
search criteria.
In an effort to solve the problems mentioned above, all materials
used in the longitudinal study TransComp, such as the source texts, the
translation assignments and the model translations, as well as all data
2
obtained in the experiments, such as the translation process protocols , the
log files, the screen records, and the subjects‟ target texts without and with
evaluation mark-up will be made available to the scientific community in
an Asset Management System (AMS), an open-source-based storage,
administration and retrieval system for digital resources. For the translation
process protocols, XML-based transcription conventions have been
developed on the basis of the Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and
Interchange (TEI Consortium 2007) of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).
They are described in detail in Göpferich (forthcoming a). In this way the
problems pointed out by Englund Dimitrova (2005: 82 f.) are addressed.
She states that so far “no single, widely accepted model for coding and
analysis” has been developed and that “there does not yet seem to be an
established way of reporting protocol data”. The AMS will contribute to
the solution of this problem and facilitate future multi-centre studies, in
which, for instance, source texts and assignments can be downloaded from
the system and used with subjects from other translation-oriented
programmes and with other language combinations; these data can then
flow into the system and be compared with the ones from our own and
other studies.
Ideally, such an AMS could form part of an Internet portal that
provides access to one or several archives of data collected in
investigations into translation processes. These could be stored in such a
way that by applying certain search criteria, specific types of data could be
retrieved (e.g., all the data resulting from a specific project or from
3
experiments in which professional translators took part). Translation
process researchers could then use these data as a corpus of reference with
2 The term translation process protocol refers to the transcript of what has been said
(e.g. think aloud) but also of other actions that have occurred during the translation
process, such as the consultation of dictionaries and the refitting of the headset.
3 For such an archive with regard to writing process research, cf. Strömqvist et al.
(2006: 71) and Sullivan/Lindgren (2006b: 210 f.).
which to compare their own data and findings, which could then also be
uploaded into the archive, thereby enabling several smaller-scale studies to
become extended into a larger-scale one on a cooperative basis.
Furthermore, such an Internet portal could also form a valuable
resource of material for translation pedagogy, in which a process-oriented
approach has now been advocated for about a decade (cf. Gile 1994, 2004;
Kußmaul 1995, 2000, 2007), especially in “[c]ourses for experienced
translators, who want to improve their methods rather than acquire basic
experience, which they already have” (Gile 1994: 112), in “[c]ourses
involving source and target languages that the teacher does not know”
(Gile 1994: 112), and in courses for students at the beginning of their
training in translation (Gile 2004). Samples from the process data stored in
the Internet portal could be used in the translation classroom not only to
give students insight into typical shortcomings in problem-solving
processes but also into strategies that have led to successful or particularly
creative translation solutions (cf. the numerous examples in Kußmaul
1995, 2000, and 2007).
Asset Management Systems provide the type of functionality needed
for these purposes. These electronic systems allow us to import and export
digital resources of any type, such as texts, graphics, videos, and sound
files (including format conversions), to annotate them using meta-data, to
retrieve data and analyse them, to view and play sound and video files, to
bundle files which belong together, and to archive and version them.
By providing easily accessible information on the Internet, an AMS
supports collaborative work beyond the boundaries of departments,
institutions, and even countries. Another advantage of an AMS is the
possibility of connecting files (e.g., transcripts and the screen-recording
files on which they are based) via hyperlinks and thus reducing the amount
of work involved in data transcription as will be explained below (cf. also
Stigler 2008). Additionally, Asset Management Systems allow various
display options. Whereas some researchers want to use specific
interpretation categories that have been tagged into a corpus of process
data, others prefer a clean corpus without such tagging and do not want to
be influenced by other researchers‟ interpretation mark-up. As will be
shown, the display options in an AMS can be designed in such a way that
users can choose what types of information in the transcripts they wish to
display. Furthermore, Asset Management Systems also allow storing
documents in different versions, for example, in the form of „pure‟
transcripts without interpretation mark-up as a resource for various types
of research, and as transcripts with such tagging for purposes of
4
verifiability.
In the following, the AMS developed for the longitudinal study
TransComp (Göpferich et al. 2008 ff.) will be described.
3. The TransComp AMS
Figure 1. Start page of the TransComp Asset Management System
4 Where a „clean‟ version of a transcript is not available in an AMS, it can easily be

produced from an XML document by removing unwanted interpretation tags by
means of an editor‟s search-and-replace option (search for the unwanted tags and
replace them with nothing).
The TransComp AMS has been implemented using Fedora open-source

repository software (cf. Fedora). Fig. 1, which shows its start page,
provides general information on the project. Project data and contact
information (see Fig. 2) can be obtained by clicking on the link “ Project
Data & Contact” at the bottom of the page (not visible in Fig. 1).
Figure 2. The page “ Project Data & Contact”

3.1 Accessing “Materials”
The materials used in TransComp, i.e. the source texts, translation

assignments and model translations, can be accessed via the link
“Materials” in the menu on the left.
Figure 3. Materials: source texts, translation assignments, and model

translations
Where useful, the materials are provided in different formats. As can be
seen from the screenshot in Fig. 3, the “Source Texts and Assignments” are
provided in two formats: as PDF documents and as Translog project files.
The PDF documents include both the translation assignment and the source
text in one document, the Translog project files only include the source
5
text to be displayed in Translog and the Translog project specification
because the assignments are usually handed out to the subjects in printed
form. The files can either be opened directly by clicking on the respective
file designation in the main window or saved to a storage medium by
placing the mouse cursor on them, pressing the right mouse button and
selecting the option desired. Note that Translog 2006 files, which are XML
5 The Translog project specification describes how the source text will be displayed.
files, have to be saved as *.project if you wish to open them directly in

Translog.
3.2 Accessing data
All data collected in the experiments can be accessed in two ways: either
via the “Experimental Waves”, in which the data were collected, or via the
“Subjects”, who took part in the experiments. Fig. 4 shows the list of all
experiments conducted in the first experimental wave (“Wave 1”) with the
student subjects.
Figure 4. Experiments conducted in the first experimental wave with the student
subjects
Fig. 5 below shows the list of all experiments in which the student subject
BKR has taken part so far.
Figure 5. Experiments in which the student subject BKR took part

To access the data collected in an experiment, its designation has to be
clicked on in the main window. Clicking on “Wave 2 / Source Text A5 /
Student BKR” in the screen shown in Fig. 5, for example, opens the view
shown in Fig. 6.
Figure 6. Access to the data collected in the translation experiment

“Wave 2 / Source Text A5 / Student BKR”
This display can be subdivided into three areas: (1) an area (“more”),
where the meta-data can be displayed; (2) the window on the left, where
the transcript can be displayed; and (3) the window on the right, where the
screen record can be replayed.
Figure 7. Access to meta-data

By clicking on “more”, the meta-data for the experiment will be displayed
as shown in Fig. 7. The meta-data include information about the subject,
the experimental setting (date of the experiment, duration in minutes,
description of the situation in the room where the experiment was

conducted, methods and software used for the experiment, a short
description of the task to be carried out, the documents that have resulted
from the experiment), the resources available to the subjects during the
experiment, and the persons responsible for the experiment
(responsibilities). The individual documents (the transcript of the
experiment with XML mark-up, the target text produced by the subject
both as a TXT-file and as a PDF-file, the target text with evaluation
comments again both as a PDF-file and as a DOC-file, and the Translog
recording as a PDF-file and as an XML-file for replay in Translog) can be
accessed by clicking on their designations. An example of a transcript with
XML-mark-up can be found in Appendix A. Appendix B shows an
example of a target text with evaluation comments. The coding of meta-
data in XML is described in Göpferich (forthcoming a).
Clicking on “more” again closes the meta-data window and brings
the user back to the display in Fig. 6. Clicking on one of the phases shown
on the left opens the transcript of that phase without any mark-up. To
display the mark-up, the respective box has to be ticked in the upper part
of the window. In Fig. 8 below, the main phase has been opened and the
category “problem” has been ticked, so that all passages in which the
subject is solving a translation problem in the main phase are displayed.
For identifying instances of such problems, we use an adapted version of
Krings‟ (1986: 121) classification of problem indicators, which he
developed as a means of identifying translation problems in transcripts in a
consistent and inter-subjective way. Krings differentiates between primary
and secondary problem indicators. Primary problem indicators are clear
evidence of translation problems, whereas secondary problem indicators
only lead to the assumption that there might have been a problem in the
translation process. For this reason, Krings only counts those phenomena
as translation problems for which there is either one primary problem
indicator or for which there are at least two secondary problem indicators.
Like Krings we count the following phenomena as primary problem
indicators: (1) utterances by means of which subjects make clear that they
have a translation problem, e.g. “da weiß ich jetzt net was das genau
bedeutet” [here I don‟t know what it means exactly]; (2) any consultation
of a source of reference (printed or online dictionary, parallel text, etc.);

and (3) gaps in the target text resulting from not knowing how to translate
certain source-text units. Krings‟ list of secondary problem indicators had
to be adapted for our purposes (for the reasons, see Göpferich forthcoming
a). What we count as secondary problem indicators are: (1) alternative
tentative translation equivalents; (2) negative evaluations of target-text
units verbalized by the translator; (3) unfilled pauses of a duration of at
least three seconds; (4) certain vocalized non-lexical phenomena, such as
sighing; and (5) the inability to think of a primary equivalent association.
What is important here is that these are only secondary problem
indicators. This means that if any one of them does not occur in
combination with at least one other problem indicator, the respective
passage in the transcript is not counted as an instance of a translation
problem. There is one exception to this: if subjects take up a problem that
they have worked on previously, the earlier occurrence of the problem is
counted as one problem indicator. As a consequence, one additional
secondary problem indicator for the same item that caused the problem
suffices for counting that particular passage in the transcript as a recurring
instance of a translation problem.
Sections in which at least two secondary problem indicators occur
but where it is not clear what may have caused the potential problem are
not counted as instances of translation problems. Comments on the
difficulty of the text and on whether the subject liked it or not are not
considered problem indicators.
Problems may occur in any phase of the translation process, not only
in the main phase. Problem instances start when the subject becomes aware
of the problem. In the transcript, the start tag is placed immediately before
the utterance or action indicating this. A problem instance ends when the
subject has solved the problem or turns to something else. This is where
the end tag is placed.
In TransComp, the occurrence of a translation problem is transcribed
as follows:
<incident xml:id="1" type="problem" subtype="conditioning"
start="00:06:16" end="00:06:17">
</incident>
As can be seen from the example above, instances of interpretation

categories are enclosed in incident tags. They are specified as instances of
translation problems by means of the type attribute with the value problem.
The cause of the translation problem is indicated in a subtype attribute
whose value is the source-text element or any other indication of what
caused the translation problem. In the example above, the translation
problem was caused by the source-text item conditioning. All occurrences
of translation problems are provided with a running number. In the
example above, this is xml:id="1", which means that this is the first
translation problem in the experiment. Furthermore, the time is indicated
when the subject first showed signs of having a translation problem (start)
as well as the time when the subject had solved the problem or turned to
something else (end). If the subject does not solve a problem and returns to
it later, this is also indicated in the number. When addressing the problem
for the second time, the number that the problem had at its first occurrence
is retained, followed by “.2”; when it is taken up for the third time, the
same number is used, followed by “.3”, etc. In the example below, the
subject returns to the problem in the example above for the second time:
<incident xml:id="1.2" type="problem" subtype="conditioning"
start="00:06:47" end="00:06:54">ähm: ja das weiß ich immer noch nicht so
recht wie ich das übersetzen soll</incident>
Encoding such instances of interpretation categories in transcripts can be

much more difficult and time-consuming than “just” transcribing what has
been said and done, even if the latter also requires an interpretative effort
which should not be underestimated. Nevertheless, transcribing what has
been said and done can often be delegated to student assistants. However,
the encoding of instances of interpretation categories usually cannot be
delegated and has to be done by researchers themselves. Smagorinsky
(1994: 19) explains this as follows: “However, coding is an analytical and
recursive process. It is thus an integral part of the research process, and the
exact coding system must develop in interaction with the data.” (cf. also
Göpferich 2008: Section 3.9)
Encoding instances of translation problems with their beginning and
their end (start attribute and end attribute) has advantages in Asset
Management Systems. The time indications can be used for linking
sections of the transcript to the corresponding positions in the sound or

video file on which the transcript is based. As illustrated in Fig. 8 below, in
the TransComp AMS, transcripts and the corresponding screen-recording
files are linked in such a way that clicking on a translation problem in the
transcript starts the section of the video file where this problem is
documented. This feature may not only be useful in translation process
research, but also for illustrative purposes in the translation classroom.
Figure 8. Linking passages of transcripts to the corresponding sections in the

6
screen record
By linking transcripts to the corresponding screen-recording files, what is
encoded can be reduced to those phenomena which seem most relevant for
answering the research questions asked. However, other phenomena,
which have not been encoded because they seemed to be less important at
first, do not get lost but are retained in the screen-recording file and can be
encoded in the transcript later, if necessary. Furthermore, during the phase
6 Problem No. 1 (“speaks vs. talks”) refers to the following passage of the source text,
which had to be translated from English into German: “Moja, together with a dozen
or so other chimps and one gorilla in the United States, talks. She doesn‟t speak – she
talks. She communicates with her fingers in American Sign Language, devised for,
and used by, hundreds of thousands of deaf Americans.”
of analysis, the transcripts and screen-recording files can be used in

parallel, which has the advantage that certain phenomena can be observed
much more precisely in the screen-recording file than they could ever have
been documented in a transcript. This is another advantage of making
process data accessible in an AMS.
As mentioned above, in the transcripts, the problems are numbered
and given designations which specify the items in the source text that
caused the translation problems. These numbers and designations do not
only appear in the transcripts in the highlighted line at the top of the
passage in which the translation problem occurred but also below the video
window on the right in Figs 6 and 8. If one clicks on them, the passage of
7
the screen record is replayed. The duration of this passage is given in
minutes and seconds at the right end of the highlighted line at the top of
the problem box.
In this way, the transcripts are linked to the screen-recording files.
The size of the screen recording window can be increased by clicking on
the symbol marked with a circle in Fig. 8.
Apart from the problem passages described above (“problem”), the
following phenomena can be highlighted in the transcripts by ticking the
respective box at the top of the screen:
“utterance”. Utterances are verbalizations that the subject makes
without reading from a written document such as the source text, the
target text produced so far or any work of reference.
“self-dictate”. What the subjects dictate to themselves while typing is
marked as “self-dictate”.
“read”. “Read” indicates reading processes.
“consult”. “Consult” indicates the looking-up of items in external
resources.
“vocal”. “Vocal” indicates non-lexical phenomena, such as smacking
one‟s lips, sniffing, and sighing.
“pause”. “Pause” indicates pauses where the subjects do not do or
verbalize anything.
7 This may take a few seconds because the screen recording file (in flash format) has to
be downloaded first.
“shift”. “Shift” indicates changes in voice quality such as lowering

one‟s voice, speaking up, speaking in an approving or disapproving
tone.
“other”. Clicking on “other” displays the mark-up of actions such as
typing or clicking silently, refitting the head-set, drinking, etc.
A detailed description of all these categories and the way they are
transcribed is given in Göpferich (forthcoming a).
3.3 Additional information
The other links on the left of Fig. 1 provide access to the “Publications”
resulting from the research project TransComp, to the documentation of the
XML schema file developed for TransComp (“Schema documentation”; cf.
Göpferich forthcoming a), the “Bibliographic Database TransPro”, which
contains an online bibliography on translation process research,
information on a “Mailing List” for people interested in translation process
research, and to the links of “Other Research Groups” active in the field of
translation process research.
The materials used and all the data collected in the TransComp
experiments conducted so far have been uploaded into the AMS described
above (Göpferich et al. 2008 ff.). At the moment, these materials and data
are password-protected because the source texts will also be used in future
test waves of TransComp, and we have to make sure that our subjects do
not have access to them until the last test wave has been completed (in
August 2011). After this, password protection will be removed and the
data can be accessed freely.
3.4 Uploading data
For data upload, there is a special client software, which is password-

protected, too. The screenshot in Fig. 9 gives an impression of what the
user interface in this client looks like. For each experiment conducted, a
so-called „object‟ has to be created with a special identification number
(the lines in the background of Fig. 9). For each of these objects, all the
individual files belonging to it can be uploaded in the overlaid window. As
a last step, each object has to be attributed to the „data containers‟ to which
it belongs. For each experiment, these are the containers of the
experimental wave and of the subject involved. This ensures that the data
can be accessed in the AMS both via the link “Experimental Waves” and
via the link “Subjects”.
Figure 9. Client for data upload
4. Conclusion
This article has illustrated how data collected in translation process

research can be made available on the Internet in Asset Management
Systems (AMS). Furthermore, is has shown the added value that such
systems offer, for example, by allowing to connect files in such a way that
they can be analysed in parallel. If an increasing number of researchers
made use of such systems, this could pave the way for collaborative work
beyond the boundaries of departments, institutions, and even countries, an
effort which is indispensable to collect corpora of sizes which allow

generalizations.
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Krings, H. P. 1986. Was in den Köpfen von Übersetzern vorgeht. Eine empirische
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Krings, H. P. 2001. Repairing Texts: Empirical Investigations of Machine

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Kußmaul, P. 1995. Training the Translator. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John
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Kußmaul, P. 2000. Kreatives Übersetzen. (Studien zur Translation 10). Tübingen:
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Appendix A
Example of a transcript following the TEI guidelines (containing

translation-process-specific deviations) from the corpus of the research
project TransComp. The example is an extract from the transcript of a
translation process from English into German. It illustrates the guidelines
followed in TransComp. The spoken text enclosed in tags is encoded
according to the GAT conventions (see Selting et al. 1998 and Göpferich
forthcoming a), i.e., the German text has been written without capitals
except for sounds that the subject emphasized, the lengthening of vowels is
indicated by one or more colons, etc.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<teiCorpus xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://gams.uni-graz.at/transcomp/1.0 http://gams.uni-
graz.at/schemas/transcomp/1.0/transcomp.xsd"
xmlns="http://gams.uni-graz.at/transcomp/1.0">
<teiHeader type="corpus">
<fileDesc>
<titleStmt>
<title>TransComp: The Development of Translation Competence</title>
<respStmt>
<resp>Leader</resp>
<name>Susanne Göpferich</name>
</respStmt>
<respStmt>
<resp>Participant</resp>
<name>Gerrit Bayer-Hohenwarter</name>
</respStmt>
<respStmt>
<resp>TEI Modeling</resp>
<name>Hubert Stigler</name>
</respStmt>
</titleStmt>
<publicationStmt>
<publisher>TransComp</publisher>
<pubPlace>Graz</pubPlace>
<date>2008</date>
</publicationStmt>
<notesStmt>
<note type="description">TransComp is a process-oriented longitudinal
study which explores the development of translation competence in 12
students of translation over a period of 3 years and compares it to that of
10 professional translators. The insight into the components which make
up translation competence and into its development gained in the project
will be utilized for translation pedagogy and the improvement of curricula
for translator training.</note>
</notesStmt>
<sourceDesc>
<p>Cf. sources of the individual transcripts.</p>
</sourceDesc>
</fileDesc>
</teiHeader>
<TEI>
<teiHeader type="text">
<fileDesc>
<titleStmt>
<title>TransComp: t1_A1_Stud_SFR</title>
<respStmt>
<resp>Experimenter</resp>
<name xml:id="SEG">Susanne Göpferch</name>

</respStmt>
<respStmt>
<resp>Experimenter</resp>
<name xml:id="SWI">Solvejg Wiedecke</name>
</respStmt>
<respStmt>
<resp>Transcriber</resp>
<name>Solvejg Wiedecke</name>
</respStmt>
<respStmt>
<resp>Proof-Reader</resp>
<name>Susanne Göpferch</name>
</respStmt>
<respStmt>
<resp>Proof-Reader</resp>
<name xml:id="GBH">Gerrit Bayer-Hohenwarter</name>
</respStmt>
</titleStmt>
<publicationStmt>
<publisher>TransComp</publisher>
<pubPlace>Graz</pubPlace>
<date>2008</date>
</publicationStmt>
<sourceDesc>
<recordingStmt>
<p>transcript of thinking-aloud from Camtasia Studio screen
recording with sound; additional hardware and software used:
Translog 2006 Academic Edition, Webcam</p>
<p>
<ptr type="source_of_transcript"
target="t1_A1_Stud_SFR.camrec"/>
</p>
</recordingStmt>
</sourceDesc>
</fileDesc>
<profileDesc>
<particDesc>
<person xml:id="SFR" role="student" sex="2" age="21">
<nationality>German</nationality>
<state type="competence_level">
<ab>t1</ab>
</state>
<state type="typing_skills">
<ab>touch typist</ab>
</state>
<langKnowledge>
<langKnown level="mother_tongue" tag="de-AT"/>

<langKnown level="L2" tag="en"/>
</langKnowledge>
</person>
</particDesc>
<settingDesc>
<setting>
<date when="2007-10-20T10:28:00" dur="P69M"/>
<locale>LabCom.Doc</locale>
</setting>
<setting>
<ab type="description">quiet room, light on, experimenters present in
background</ab>
<ab type="methods_used">think-aloud, key logging, screen
recording, webcam recording, questionnaire</ab>
<ab type="software_used">Translog 2006 Academic Edition,
Camtasia Studio</ab>
<ab type="assignment">translation of a popular-science text from
English into German</ab>
<ab type="documents">
<ptr type="source_text" xml:lang="en" target="http://"/>
<ptr type="target_text" xml:lang="de" target="http://"/>
<ptr type="model_translation" xml:lang="de" target="http://"/>
<ptr type="assignment" xml:lang="de" target="http://"/>
</ab>
<ab type="resources">
<listBibl>
<bibl>Internet</bibl>
<bibl xml:id="Webster">Webster's Collegiate Dictionary</bibl>
<bibl xml:id="Wahrig">Wahrig Die deutsche
Rechtschreibung</bibl>
<bibl xml:id="LCE">Longman Dictionary of Contemporary
English</bibl>
<bibl xml:id="Duden-SSW">Duden Sinn- und sachverwandte
Wörter</bibl>
<bibl xml:id="Oxford-Duden">Oxford Duden German
Dictionary</bibl>
</listBibl>
</ab>
</setting>
</settingDesc>
</profileDesc>
</teiHeader>
<text>
<body>
<div type="pre-phase">
<u start="00:00:59" end="00:03:39">also dann les ich mir das jetzt mal
durch<vocal>sniffs</vocal> <vocal>swallows</vocal><incident
type="reads entire ST silently"/></u>
</div>
<div type="main-phase">
<u start="00:03:39" end="01:02:27">ok wa:s das en jetzt?<pause
dur="3"/>vorhin war schon besser.<vocal>sighs</vocal>
<incident type="reads ST"><shift loud="p">we don’t want a thing
because we found a reason for it we find reasons for it because we want
it</shift></incident><pause dur="2"/>ok
<incident type="self-dictates">wa:rum? men:schen rauchen
</incident><pause dur="7"/> <vocal>sniffs</vocal>wir wollen etwas
NIcht weil wir einen grund dafür gefunden haben<pause dur="1"/>wir
finden grün:de dafür weil wir<pause dur="1"/>es wollen<pause
dur="6"/>wir wollen ein ding nicht<pause dur="5"/>
<incident type="self-dictates">nicht, weil wir einen grund dafür
<vocal>sniffs</vocal>gefunden haben<pause dur="2"/>wir finden
gründe dafür, weil wir es wollen</incident>stimmt das?
<incident type="reads TT"><shift loud="p">wir wollen ein ding <pause
dur="1"/>nicht, weil wir einen grund dafür gefunden haben <pause
dur="1"/>wir finden gründe da:für,<pause dur="2"/>weil wir es
wollen<pause dur="3"/></shift></incident>ja, stimmt
<vocal>sniffs</vocal><pause dur="10"/>
<incident type="types"/><vocal>sniffs</vocal>
<incident type="reads ST"><shift loud="p">inspite of the importance of
psychological<pause dur="1"/>or conditioning factors in
addiction</shift></incident>
<incident xml:id="1" type="problem" subtype="conditioning"
start="00:06:16" end="00:06:17">häh:::? </incident>
<incident type="reads ST"><shift loud="p">it is the craving that <pause
dur="2"/>most often causes the addict to fail in any attempt to
quit</shift></incident><vocal>sighs</vocal>inspite <pause
dur="1"/>trotz der<vocal>smacks</vocal>importance ähm: ja:
wichtigkeit<pause dur="1"/>von psycho cholo:gischen: und conditioning
<incident xml:id="1.2" type="problem" subtype="conditioning"
start="00:06:47" end="00:06:54">ähm: ja das weiß ich immer noch nicht
so recht wie ich das übersetzen soll</incident><pause dur="1"/>
factors,<pause dur="1"/>hm:<pause dur="1"/>addiction abhängigkeit
und gewohnheit<pause dur="1"/>fü:r<pause dur="2">physi<pause
dur="1"/>physische<vocal>sniffs</vocal> ähm: substanzen <pause
dur="7"/>.h conditionin ja,<pause dur="2"/>ja, ok. .h trotz der
wichtigkeit<pause dur="1"/>von: <pause dur="2"/>psychologischen und
conditioning [...]
</u>
</div>
<div type="post-phase">
<u start="01:02:27" end="01:09:17">
<incident type="reads TT">warum menschen rauchen. .hhh wir wollen
ein ding nicht weil wir einen grund dafür gefunden haben wir finden
gründe dafür weil wir es wolln:</incident><pause dur="5"/>ja.
<incident type="self-dictates">will:</incident>[…
</u>
</div>
</body>
</text>
</TEI>
</teiCorpus>
Appendix B
Example of an evaluated target text (Wave 1 / Source Text A3 / Student

SFR). For an explanation of the error classification used, see Göpferich
(forthcoming b).
Markers of translator gender: Do they really matter?1,2
Miriam Shlesinger, Moshe Koppel, Noam Ordan and Brenda Malkiel
The summers spent with Arnt and colleagues from the Copenhagen
Business School at the retreat in Skagen were as close to heaven as I’ll ever
get. In his enviably laid-back way, Arnt managed to mold us into an
irrepressible think tank. We wrote articles, he produced grant proposals,
and all of us reveled in long walks along the magnificent beaches of that
picturesque town on the tip of Jutland. Our explorations of the “migratory
dune,” our visits to the “sunken church,” and the wonderful evenings spent
lolling in the spacious parlor of the mansion that became our home during
those magical weeks – are etched in my memory and in my heart. Back in
Copenhagen, it was Arnt who introduced me to Karen Blixen’s home, and
all the stories that go with it, and Arnt – never rushed, never appearing
pressured – who took me to see the opera building and other highlights of
Copenhagen architecture. It was also Arnt who set up CRITT and so many
other cornerstones of collaborative research at CBS. And on an even more
personal level, it was Arnt who did me the unforgettable honor of co-
editing and publishing Interpreting Studies and Beyond – a very special
volume of the Copenhagen Studies in Language. I feel privileged to have
been given this opportunity to express my appreciation, in some small way,
for the gift of having Arnt as my friend. (And I am grateful to my co-
authors, who have not had the good fortune of meeting Arnt, for agreeing
to dedicate our first collaborative article to Arnt Lykke Jakobsen.)
Miriam Shlesinger
1
This research was partially supported by the Israel Science Foundation, grant no.
1180/06.
2
We thank our colleague Jonathan Fine for his valuable input on an earlier version of
this article.
184 Miriam Shlesinger, Moshe Koppel, Noam Ordan & Brenda Malkiel
Abstract
Given the impressive record of machine learning in telling male- from

female-authored texts in various genres, we asked whether the computer
could also be “taught” to tell male- from female-translated texts. Our
corpus, downloaded from the website of Words Without Borders, consisted
of 273 samples of literary prose translated into English from a variety of
languages. We found that despite its ability to isolate particular features of
male- vs. female-translated texts, the computer could not be trained to
accurately predict the gender of the translator. We see the difference
between our results and those for original texts as highlighting the
limitations of the classical social-science methodologies; i.e.
notwithstanding the successful application of methods for isolating discrete
features of male-translated vs. female-translated texts, these features were
found to have little or no predictive value when tested in a cross-validation
experiment. In other words, the same cross-validation approach that has
been shown to be highly predictive in the case of author-gender attribution
has proven unreliable for translator-gender attribution. We explore the
implications of these results, both with regard to the competing
methodologies and in terms of their implications for Translation Studies.
1. Introduction
In the Book of Judges we are told of a battle between two peoples, the
Gileadites and Ephraimites. When the defeated Ephraimites tried to cross
the Jordan River in an effort to return to their own territory, the Gileadites
blocked the passage. Being unable to spot an Ephraimite by appearance –
for all practical purposes, the Ephraimites resembled members of the
neighboring tribe of Menashe – the Gileadites devised a method of
identifying them by their pronunciation: capitalizing on the Ephraimites‟
well-known inability to distinguish between [s] and [š]. Every person who
wished to cross the river was required to pronounce the telltale [šɪbələθ],
and whoever pronounced it [sɪbələθ] met his demise. The biblical story
(Judges, 12) is among the earliest descriptions of a categorization task. It
includes two important concepts – classes and features – with the
Markers of translator gender: Do they really matter? 185
Ephraimites and non-Ephraimites as classes and the minimal pair [s] and
[š] a phonetic feature.
In many ways, the story of the Ephraimites is reminiscent of
contemporary work on text categorization, in which one aims to assign an
anonymous text to a particular class. Early work in authorship attribution
used a variety of statistical methods to identify what are known as stylistic
discriminators – characteristics that were relatively consistent in the oeuvre
of a particular author, but varied from one author to the next.
Mathematicians and linguists saw the potential of machine learning for
extending the scope of text categorization, and attempted to bridge between
early work in stylometrics and contemporary computer-based
methodologies. One of the main by-products of this interface, the study of
author attribution, is a productive field of inquiry in computer science to
this day (see e.g. Joula 2008, Koppel et al. 2008, Stamatatos 2009). Indeed,
the growing popularity of machine-learning techniques at the turn of the
millennium has allowed for a sophisticated, robust and accurate approach
to this endeavor. As in the case of our opening example, typical features of
language, such as the distribution patterns of function words or content
words, n-grams, lexical categories (technically part-of-speech tags), and
even character n-grams have been used to categorize items by gender, age
group, personality, mother tongue, etc.
There are two obvious advantages to automated text categorization
over the standard (i.e. social science) statistical methods: (a) it is
incomparably faster; and (b) it is bias-free, as evidenced by the fact that its
analyses are completely reproducible. Among other applications, it can be
used to examine problems of interest to scholars in the humanities, and can
be tailored to a broad range of languages, text types, and research
questions. Thus, for example, Koppel et al. (2006) were able to identify the
most likely author of a document of unknown provenance and Strous et al.
(forthcoming) succeeded in discriminating between texts produced by those
diagnosed with schizophrenia and those produced by non-psychiatrically ill
individuals.
In the present study, we set out to explore another categorization task
– the classification of translated texts, focusing on translator-gender
attribution. We will first consider the matter from a standard social-science
perspective. We will base our study on a corpus of documents some of
which were translated by males and some of which were translated by

females. We will determine which, if any, linguistic features are used
significantly differently by male and female translators and will attempt to
explain any such differences. We will then consider the matter from the
text categorization perspective to determine if the differences we have
found have predictive value.
2. The standard approach: identifying indicators of translator gender
Gender is one of the major preoccupations of contemporary social

sciences and humanities. Early research into differences between male and
female discourse concentrated on socio-psychological aspects, and on the
stereotypization and power differential of gender roles, as represented in
language (Lakoff 1975). Studies often included discussion of
conversational cultures, and of the ways in which disparate discourse
patterns – Tannen (1990) goes so far as to speak of a genderlect – may lead
to misunderstandings. Along similar lines, linguists have examined
phonological, lexical, syntactic and pragmatic differences as well as turn-
taking patterns (Muchnik 1997), whether in oral discourse (Holmes 1990;
Labov 1990), informal writing (Mulac et al. 1990; Mulac & Lundell 1994),
texting (Herring 1996), or formal written texts (Argamon et al. 2007).
These works (see Koppel et al. 2002 and Argamon et al. 2003)
reported, among other things, that males were likelier to use determiners
and cardinal numbers, and were more prone to “specify” the things they
wrote about. They were also more “informational”, as demonstrated by
their greater use of such “indicators” as post-head modification, as in
“garden of roses”. Women, on the other hand, relied heavily on pronouns,
especially first- and second-person singular. Their frequent use of “I” has
been interpreted as a way for the writer to introduce herself into the text,
and to render it more personal; and the frequent use of “you” has been seen
as a form of “involvedness” (Biber 1995).
Inspired by the body of evidence indicating that gender manifests
itself in original texts, Elraz (2004) set out to investigate translations, using
the findings of Koppel et al. (2002) as a point of departure. Her study of
translations of the same text by twenty men and twenty women, revealed
three general tendencies: (1) male translators use more questions in their
translations; (2) female translators choose more-specific color terms; and

(3) female translators are more explicit.3 4 Saldanha (2003) and Leonardi
(2007) also found that men and women are likely to translate differently.
The former, using a corpus that was similar, in principle, to our own (i.e.
narratives translated from different languages into English), found
differences in markers of adherence (or non-adherence) to standard forms,
including such features as split infinitives and long sentences. The latter
aimed at establishing a comparative framework for the contrastive analysis
of male and female translation strategies. Using a critical contrastive text
linguistics (CCTL) paradigm, she provided tentative indications of
ideologically driven shifts in the translation process as a result of gender
differences.
The corpus used in the present study was taken in its entirety from
the website of Words Without Borders [wordswithoutborders.org] in
February 2009. It consisted of 273 samples of literary prose translated into
English from over 30 languages, among them Arabic, Chinese, French,
German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian,
and Spanish, with a total of 908,000 tokens.5 Poetry, graphic novels, drama,
essays and interviews were excluded, as were second-hand translations,
translator‟s notes, biographical information about the author, and footnotes.
The website specifies the gender of both the author and the translator. For
both the male-translated documents and the female-translated documents
included in our corpus, about two thirds were authored by males.
In Table 1 we present the function words which proved to be
significant at p<0.05. Words which were relevant as classifiers only for
3
Elraz found clear differences between male and female interpreters as well, but the
number of participants – 2 males and 2 females – did not allow for any clear
conclusions.
4
Elraz – citing Vásquez-Ayora ( – draws a clear distinction between explicitation,
on the one hand, and addition or amplification, on the other, with the former being a
broader, more “generic” term relating to the need to convey meaning whereas the
latter refers simply to the grammatical constraints of the target language. Her
implication, therefore, is that translations by women reflect a greater concern for the
transfer of meaning.
5
To quote the website: “Words Without Borders (WWB) opens doors to international
exchange through translation, publication, and promotion of the world‟s best writing.
WWB publishes selected prose and poetry on the web […]. Monthly issues of its
online magazine feature new selections of contemporary world literature, most of
which would never have been accessible to English-speaking readers without WWB.”
male-authored texts are marked with one plus-sign (+). Words relevant
only for female-authored texts are marked with a double plus-sign (++).
The items within each group are sorted according to their frequency in the
texts in descending order.
Table 1. Function words with significant differences (p<0.05) in usage between

male and female translators.
Male translators Female translators

and how
now its
off first
however say
today each
near anything
till until
nevertheless enough
everybody probably
might+ isn’t
is++ never+
are++ than+
where++ can’t+
has++ he’s+
should++ either+
getting++ dear+
done++ was++
had++
could++
been++
someone++
couldn’t++
whose++
sometimes++
she’s++
beneath++
We also considered a set of features taken from Halliday‟s Systemic

Functional Linguistics (SFL), where function words are represented in a
hierarchy and each item or set of items is checked relative to other items or
sets of items in the hierarchy (Halliday and Matthiessen 2003). Using this
method we were able to discern seven more sets of features which were
distributed differently in texts translated by men vs. texts translated by

women (see Table 2).
Some of the features in the male column are apparently related to the
“indicators” mentioned above and to men‟s more frequent use of concrete
time- and space-bound references, as in the case of „now‟, „today‟ and
„near‟. As for the use of one in male translations vs. each in female
translations, these might relate to the more personal tone in female writing.
Another contrast is between the male use of the plural pronouns we, us,
our, ours, ourselves and the female use of I’m.
Table 2. SFL features with significant differences (p<0.05) in usage between

male and female translators.

{and, or, but, yet, however} {each} relative to {someone, anyone, each,
relative to the set of other anybody, one, whoever, whomever}
conjunctions
{one} relative to {someone,
anyone, each, anybody, one, {I‟m} relative to { is, isn‟t, am, ain‟t, I‟m,
whoever, whomever} are, you‟re, aren‟t, he‟s, she‟s, they‟re}
{we, us, our, ours, ourselves}
relative to the set of second
and third person pronouns
{is} relative to { is, isn‟t, am,
ain‟t, I‟m, are, you‟re, aren‟t,
he‟s, she‟s, they‟re}
{as} relative to {like, unlike,
than, as}
In addition, we checked two more features which have proven useful in

corpus-based translation studies, namely the type-token ratio (TTR) and
mean sentence length (MSL); see Table 3.
Table 3. Mean sentence length and TTR by translator gender

MSL 19.18 16.93
TTR 0.052 0.048
The mean sentence length in translations by men in our corpus was found
to be much higher than in those by women: 19.18 words per sentence as
opposed to 16.93. This complements the finding that men make greater use
of the logical connectives and, or, but, yet, however. We also found that the
TTR in men‟s translation was higher than in women‟s: 0.052 vs. 0.048,
though this difference is not significant.
To summarize then, we have found a number of indicators of
translator gender. Taken together, these markers seem to suggest that there
are distinctive male and female translator styles.
3. The text categorization approach
We now ask a simple question: How meaningful are these differences? We

propose a measure of the meaningfulness of such differences based on their
predictive value. Specifically, we ask whether such differences are
adequate for allowing us to correctly determine the gender of the translator
of a previously unseen document. To do so, we introduce in some detail the
methodology and testing protocols now commonly used in text
categorization studies.
Figure 1, below, presents the basic architecture of a text-
categorization system. Here we are given examples of two classes of
documents, Class A and Class B.
A
(x1,x2,...,xN)=A
Text (x1,x2,...,xN)=A
(x1,x2,...,xN)=A
Cleaning+ : Learning
Feature :
Extraction (x1,x2,...,xN)=B
Algorithm
B (x1,x2,...,xN)=B
(x1,x2,...,xN)=B
Text
Model for
A vs. B
Figure 1. Architecture of a text categorization system

The first step, document representation, involves defining a set of textual

features that might potentially be useful for categorizing the texts and then
representing each text as a vector. A vector can be thought of as a long
sequence of entries, with each representing the frequency of a particular
feature in the text. If needed, this architecture can be expanded to
accommodate three or more classes.
Part of the art of this methodology lies in selecting the feature types
to be considered in converting documents to numerical vector
representations. One commonly used feature set consists of function words,
which are exceptionally useful for two very different reasons: (a) their
frequencies are unlikely to be affected by subject matter, and (b) it is
doubtful that people can consciously control their use of function words
(Chung & Pennebaker 2007). Studies of the frequencies of function words
in English texts generally focus on a few hundred items, such as
determiners, pronouns, prepositions, auxiliary and modal verbs, and
conjunctions. Although numbers and interjections are not generally
considered to be function words, they too are often included, since they too
are independent of the subject matter. Interestingly, different lists of
function words enjoy roughly similar rates of success in authorship-
attribution tasks (Koppel et al. 2008).
Once documents have been represented as vectors, a number of
learning algorithms can be used to construct models capable of
distinguishing vectors representing documents in Class A from those
representing documents in Class B. Here we used a linear separator, in
which the number of points assigned to each feature serves as an indicator
of whether this specific feature provides a reliable tool for telling one class
from the other. Since the precise number of points assigned to each class
for a given feature is determined automatically by the learning algorithm,
based on the training documents, no biases of any kind enter the process.
(Contrast this with some sociolinguistic research on gender-specific
variation which has been accused of ideological bias (cf. Wodak and Benke
1996: 128).) Typically, the features that are assigned a higher number of
points for a particular class are the most frequent ones in documents in that
class, relative to documents in the other classes. Once the point values have
been determined, a new document is classified by scanning it and counting
the points it contains for each class. The class assigned the highest number
of points for the particular document is the one to which that document is
assigned.
K-fold cross-validation is used to assess the reliability of the system.
Ten-fold cross-validation is a common choice. It is illustrated in Figure 2:
Figure 2. 10-fold cross-validation
Vertically, each column represents the categories – translations by females

and translations by males. Horizontally, there are 10 folds, each of which
contains a sample of each sub-corpus. The computer is trained on 90% of
the corpus (9 folds) in what is called the training set. In this process the
optimal features for distinguishing each of the sub-corpora are selected, and
each feature is given a certain weight, relative to the other features. The
features are represented by means of vectors, as explained earlier. The tenth
fold, the testing set, is left out for testing. The learning algorithm is now
applied to this fold and serves as an indication of the success rate of the
classification task at hand. As the name ten-fold cross-validation implies,
the procedure involves running this validation test ten times, in each of
which one fold is kept out for testing and the other nine are used as the
training set.
The last decade has seen an explosion of research in automated text
categorization. Texts may be classified by author, by topic, by period, or by
any other relevant criterion, including an anonymous author‟s native
language (Koppel et al. 2005) and ontological status – original versus
translation (Baroni and Bernadini 2006). Provided enough texts are
available and the individual texts are sufficiently long, virtually any type of
text may be classified, using machine-learning techniques such as the one
described above. The second author and his colleagues have performed
classification tasks on sections of the British National Corpus and the
International Corpus of Learner English as well as on e-mail messages,
blogs, nineteenth-century novels, rabbinic literature, and commissioned
essays.
Linguists and computer scientists working in the field of author
attribution have also used machine-learning techniques to discriminate
between texts written by men and those written by women. Recent
publications in this direction include Koppel et al. (2002), and Argamon et
al. (2003). Among other findings, the authors showed that based solely on
function words and parts of speech, they could predict which texts had been
written by men and which by women with accuracy of about 80% in ten-
fold cross-validation tests. In related work (Argamon et al. 2007), similar
features were used to determine an author‟s gender, age, mother tongue,
and personality.
4. Findings
Our research was designed to investigate whether the techniques used in

the studies described above might be applied to translations as well. In
other words, our objective in this paper has been to apply text
categorization methods for determining translator gender, and to see
whether a computer could be taught to discriminate between male- and
female-translated texts. In terms of Figure 1, female translators would be
Class A and male translators Class B. We used ten-fold cross-validation
tests on function-word frequencies, treating each of the 273 translations as
a single example.
Surprisingly, we found that while the computer was successful in
discerning many differences between the translated-by-males and
translated-by-females texts, including close to 50 differences significant at
p<.05, it was not able to distinguish between the two categories as such,
i.e., it was not able to predict translator gender. Specifically, ten-fold cross-
validation yielded an accuracy rate of only slightly above 50%, that is,
approximately the same as random guessing. This means that although each
of the indicators of translator gender was in itself significantly more
frequent in translations by one gender or the other, these indicators proved
insufficient for reliably distinguishing between translations by males and

by females when using the more advanced and comprehensive methods
currently used for author attribution and related tasks.
While it might be the case that some other feature types might have
led to better results, we note that many other text categorization problems
relating to writing style have been successfully solved using the very
feature types used here, as in the studies cited above. In fact, when we used
ten-fold cross-validation on the selfsame corpus to test for author gender,
we were able to distinguish between male and female authors with an
accuracy of 68%. It is worth noting that this accuracy is, on the one hand,
substantially better than that obtained for translator gender, but, on the
other hand, somewhat worse than that reported for author gender on
comparable corpora (Koppel et al. 2002). The first of these observations
simply reflects the fact that authors have more control over a text than
translators do. Thus, we find in this corpus, as in others studied previously
and cited above (e.g. Koppel et al. 2002), that female authors use
significantly more singular pronouns – especially female pronouns – than
male authors, while male authors use significantly more numbers than
female authors. Clearly usage of telltale features such as these is controlled
primarily by authors rather than by translators. The somewhat diminished
accuracy on author gender compared to that obtained in previous studies is
likely tied to the limited size of our corpus in terms of both the number of
documents and their length. The limited quantity of training data yields a
slightly less robust classifier, as is usually the case. However, it is also
possible that the fact that the documents passed through translation after
leaving the authors‟ hands resulted in the attenuation of some of the
differences that are found in source texts. Thus, although the evidence is
quite weak, it might be the case that the diminished accuracy as compared
to previous studies is an example of the phenomenon of “leveling”
(Shlesinger 1990, Baker 1996, Laviosa-Braithwaite 1996) or of
standardization (Toury 1995).
5. Discussion
From the perspective of Translation Studies, once it was established that

translations effectively form a distinctive textual system we had to “refine
our ideas and learn to set more specific and local agendas” (Baker 2004:
29), with the influence of gender on translations figuring as one such
specific agenda – one which was the focus of the present study. As Baker
(2004) points out, the models available for systematic analysis do not cover
the full range of features that are proving to be of interest to translation
scholars, in terms of analyzing differences between translated and non-
translated text, with translations being treated here as a kind of genre or
text type. Based on previous studies in both computer science and
Translation Studies, we had expected ten-fold cross-validation to bring us
closer to devising such a model, and discriminating between translations by
men and by women, but found that there is no reliable model available that
will allow us to examine and account for the uneven distribution of these
features across categories. Thus, although we – like Saldanha (2003), Elraz
(2004) and Leonardi (2007) – did find certain features to be significantly
more common in the translations by men or by women, these findings fell
short of providing a profile that might serve for making reliable predictions
about translator gender.6
Our data appear to indicate that whatever the differences between
male- and female-translated documents, they are less robust than those
found in original writing – so much so that even when we controlled for
author gender (i.e. even when comparing male-translated vs. female-
translated texts written solely by males or solely by females), our attempts
to reproduce a more complete profile of the gender distinction failed.
In our view, the primary importance of these findings lies in their
methodological implications. The failure of cross validation to produce a
reliable means of predicting translator gender may call into question the
significance of traditional statistical methods, in which individual
phenomena are selected for testing, and isolated instances of significant
differences are assumed to add up to a means of distinguishing male- from
female-translated documents. More broadly, if indeed the use of cross-
6
Some of our findings, moreover, run counter to theirs; e.g. Saldanha (2003) found
that females use longer sentences than males, whereas our findings point in the other
direction. Whether the different results derive from the methodologies used or from
the corpora is not clear. To resolve the issue we would presumably need to enlarge
and refine our corpora as well as our methods and to include not only lexical features
but others (e.g. word order, morphology, indicators of lexical variety, subtle stylistic
markers etc.) as well.
validation provides a more powerful and fully replicable means of

discerning differences (and similarities) between subcorpora, these findings
may imply the need to revisit conclusions based solely on traditional
(mostly social science) statistical methods, since the automated text
categorization methods used here call into question the predictive value of
such features. In the study reported here, many features were found to
distinguish male- from female-authored texts, including close to 50
differences significant at p<.05, but these proved to have little or no
predictive value. We therefore question the effectiveness of the standard
methods of categorization and suggest that automatic text categorization
may provide more rigorous and reliable, as well as replicable, results.7
6. Conclusions
Both the biblical story and modern author attribution studies present us
with ways of looking at the interface between classes and features, between
the status and social situation of the pre-given social categories and the
ostensibly neutral, indeed technical, elements used to distinguish between
them. The ethnic identity of the Ephraimites was a social fact, a structural
category imposed on individuals by society, a politicized category, with
political consequences. Although the consequences are not a direct result of
the means used to distinguish between them and non-Ephraimites, the
means of categorization proved effective, and may well teach us something
about classes and about identities. The means used in the present study fell
short of providing such a profile. Fortunately, the stakes are less fateful.
7
The present study focused on translation as a product. Triangulation with process-
oriented methodologies may be useful as well in homing in on differences in micro-
level decisions of male and female translators, as revealed in the introspective meta-
translational discourse (e.g. think-aloud protocols), online tracking (through such
programs as Translog), or even eye-tracking (see Göpferich et al. 2008). We hope to
be able to revisit process-oriented studies from the translator-attribution perspective,
and to pinpoint junctures at which the translator's decision-making process may show
consistent gender-specific patterns.
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Uncovering the ‘lost’ structure of translations
with parallel treebanks
Matthias Buch-Kromann, Iørn Korzen, and Henrik Høeg Müller
Abstract
Parallel treebanks provide a systematic way of expressing the structural

relationships between source and target texts. In this paper, we present the
general design principles behind the Copenhagen Dependency Treebanks,
a set of parallel treebanks for Danish, English, German, Italian and
Spanish with a unified annotation of morphology, syntax, discourse, and
translational equivalence. Finally, we suggest some hypotheses about
morphology and discourse, and describe how we plan to explore them
empirically on the basis of the treebanks.
1. Introduction
Human translation processes are highly complex. For each translation

segment, the translator must analyse the source text in terms of
morphology, syntax, discourse, semantics and pragmatics, and generate a
target text which invokes a meaning which is as close as possible to the
meaning or pragmatic function of the source text. 1 To create a complete
low-level model of human translation processes, one would therefore need
1
The translation segments may be short word spans in the two texts that correspond
closely in meaning, long word spans which correspond only loosely in meaning (for
instance, when content has been shifted because of cultural adaptations), or word
spans in one text which have no natural counterpart in the other text (explicitations
and implicitations). Our notion of translation segments even includes translation
errors whose corresponding text segments are easy to identify in the two texts, but
where the two segments unintentionally differ in meaning or function. Although our
annotation scheme makes it possible to annotate explicitations, implicitations,
translation errors and shifts in meaning, and the resulting annotation can be used to
easily identify these phenomena when they occur, the annotation does not in itself
explain the deeper semantic and pragmatic mechanisms that are responsible for these
phenomena, and these mechanisms are not the focus of our investigation.
200 Matthias Buch-Kromann, Iørn Korzen & Henrik Høeg Müller
to identify the underlying linguistic structures that the translator assigns to

the source and target texts in each instance of time, and their relationships
to each other – the ‘lost’ structure of the translation, which may exist only
temporarily in the translator’s mind.
Uncovering how the underlying structure unfolds in time seems
infeasible with current techniques. Key-logging and eye-tracking (Jakobsen
2006, Carl et al. 2008) provide one important part of the puzzle, but in
order to produce a plausible model of the ‘lost’ structure of the translation,
these process data must be linked to a model of the detailed linguistic
analyses that translators assign to the segments during the translation. Since
translators’ unconscious processes cannot be observed directly, the most
promising alternative source of information is to create a linguistically
annotated corpus of translations and their source texts, a so-called parallel
treebank. The treebank analyses can be viewed as approximated,
reconstructed snapshots of an idealised translator’s analyses at the end of
the translation. 2 By training monolingual and bilingual parsers on the
parallel treebank and incorporating them in detailed low-level models of
human translation processes, the parallel treebank can contribute to our
understanding of human translation processes. The parallel treebank can
also be used to answer a wide range of quantitative and qualitative research
questions about translations, such as how often particular structures occur
in different languages, how they are mapped to other languages, and what
the systematic differences between languages are.
In this paper, we briefly present the Copenhagen Dependency
Treebank (CDT) project, an ongoing project which seeks to create a
parallel treebank for Danish, English, German, Italian, and Spanish with
40,000 words in each language. The CDT treebanks are an extension of the
100,000-word Copenhagen Danish-English Parallel Dependency Treebank
(Kromann 2003, Buch-Kromann et al. 2007). Like the original Danish-
English treebank, the new CDT treebanks are based on the linguistic
2
Because of memory limitations, the brains of real translators are unlikely to store all
the processed parts of a source and target text along with a corresponding bilingual
linguistic analysis. However, we do believe that the brains of real translators are
likely to store locally coherent fragments of bilingual linguistic analyses at each
instance of time, and that, taken together, these locally coherent fragments will
usually (but not always) constitute a globally coherent bilingual linguistic analysis,
which functions as the cognitive justification for our idealised translator.
Uncovering the ‘lost’ structure of translations with parallel treebanks 201
principles of the dependency theory Discontinuous Grammar (Buch-

Kromann 2006), which will be outlined in Section 2. They differ from the
original parallel treebank in that they incorporate a larger number of
languages (German, Italian, and Spanish) and a linguistic annotation which
includes not only syntax, but morphology, discourse structure, anaphors,
and a much more fine-grained inventory of adverbial relations. The
underlying text corpus (Keson and Norling-Christensen 1998) consists of a
diverse mixture of general-purpose texts, which have been translated from
Danish by a single professional translator for each language. In order to
separate “pure” translation from paraphrasing and reformulation, the
translators were instructed to produce fluent target-language text while
staying as close to the Danish original as possible. Our aim was to
maximise the usefulness of the treebanks for machine translation and
contrastive linguistics, where large translation segments with loosely
coupled meanings are not of much value. However, treebanks are useful
even in the study of translations without these restrictions since we can
train a bitext parser for any two languages in the parallel treebank, and use
the parser to automatically produce treebank annotations for any set of
translations between the two languages.
The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, our unified
annotation principles for syntax, morphology, discourse and translational
equivalences are described. In Section 3, we proceed to demonstrate how
information can be extracted from the treebanks. Section 4 presents some
hypotheses about morphology and discourse and shows how the treebanks
could be used to explore these hypotheses. Finally, our findings are
summed up in Section 5.
2. Unified annotation principles
2.1. The underlying theory
The CDT treebanks are based on the theoretical assumption that human
language users interpret a text compositionally by linking all the
morphemes, words, and discourse segments in a text or spoken discourse
by means of a large inventory of dependency relations, including
complement and adjunct relations, supplemented by a set of secondary
dependency relations and anaphor-antecedent relations. Figure 1

exemplifies our approach by giving a complete CDT analysis of the
morphology, syntax, and discourse structure of the English utterance (1)
below. The annotation at the different levels will be explained in detail in
the following sections.
(1) Mary was furious. John’s missing repayment had forced her to give up all she had
worked for. She pulled the trigger. It was payback time.
Figure 1. A complete CDT analysis of the entire discourse (1). The labels are
explained in the following sections.
The unified annotation distinguishes CDT from other treebank projects,

which tend to focus on a single linguistic level. For instance, the Penn
Treebank (Marcus et al. 1993) and the Prague Dependency Treebank
(Böhmová et al. 2003) mainly focus on syntax; the Penn Discourse
Treebank (Prasad et al. 2008a/b) and the RST Treebank (Carlson et al.
2001) on discourse, and the GNOME project (Poesio 2004) on coreference
annotation. Although a unified annotation scheme is slightly unusual, it
offers several advantages.
First, it means that we are able to solve the difficult problem of
having to draw a precise boundary between morphology, syntax, and
discourse, i.e., we do not have to answer questions such as the following:
Are clitic elements viewed as part of syntax or as part of morphology? Are
the relations between subordinate clauses and their governing clauses
viewed as part of syntax or part of discourse? If the annotation of
morphology, syntax and discourse is made independently by different
people in different projects, the resulting annotations will almost inevitably
have mutually incompatible gaps and overlap at fuzzy boundaries between
the different levels. With a unified annotation scheme, we can avoid this
problem.
Second, if the annotation is restricted to a single linguistic level, the
segmentation will limit the kind of linguistic relations that can be
annotated. For example, most discourse theories and discourse treebanks
divide the text into segments that correspond to clauses or entire sentences.
But this crude segmentation of the text impedes the insight that discourse
relations are not always relations between entire clauses or sentences: a
long discourse segment consisting of several sentences may actually be
better described as an elaboration of a single morpheme, word or short
phrase than as an elaboration of the containing clause. An example is given
in utterance (2) below, where the second and third sentences are most
naturally analysed as elaborations of the NP their judgment in the first
sentence.
(2) The two convicted executives, chairman Niels Jensen and director Peter Hansen,
appealed their judgment with a demand for acquittal. The chairman received a
year and a half in jail. The bank’s director received 6 months in jail.
The exclusive reliance on a single linguistic level may also blur the insight
that many constructions at one linguistic level have almost identical
counterparts at other linguistic levels, and that the inventory of linguistic
relations should be very similar across the different levels.
Finally, there is a plethora of linguistic theories that could be used to
describe the different linguistic levels. Although these theories tend to be
based on the same underlying principles, these principles are frequently
formulated in ways that may seem almost entirely incompatible with each
other, as dictated by the technical machinery that the theory uses to encode
complex phenomena such as discontinuous word order and secondary
dependencies. While it is obviously impossible to eliminate the reliance on
linguistic theory, the use of a unified annotation scheme for morphology,
syntax and discourse greatly reduces the number of potential
incompatibilities between the different linguistic levels because the
annotation is based on a single, coherent underlying linguistic theory.
In the Copenhagen Dependency Treebanks, the smallest segments in
the text or spoken discourse are morphemes which are linked into larger
units of morphology, syntax and discourse by means of a primary tree
structure supplemented by an inventory of secondary relations. Our claim is
that this inventory of mechanisms is sufficient to give us a unified account
of morphology, syntax and discourse which is theoretically appealing while
providing an excellent basis for time efficient large-scale linguistic
annotation. In the following sections, we will describe our annotation
scheme in more detail.
2.2. Syntax
The syntactic annotation in the CDT treebanks is based on the linguistic

principles outlined in the dependency theory Discontinuous Grammar
(Buch-Kromann 2006) and the syntactic annotation principles of the
Copenhagen Danish-English Parallel Dependency Treebank (Kromann
2003, Buch-Kromann et al. 2007). As in other dependency theories, all
linguistic relations in the CDT treebanks are represented as directed
relations between words or morphemes. We presuppose that the
compositional semantics of a sentence is determined by a primary
dependency structure in which each word or morpheme is assumed to act
as a complement or adjunct to another word, called the governor.

Complements function as arguments to their governors (i.e., they are
lexically licensed by the governor, and the governor’s lexical entry
specifies how the meaning of the complements should be integrated into
the meaning of the governor in the compositional semantics), whereas
adjuncts function as modifiers (i.e., the governor is lexically licensed by the
adjunct, and the adjunct’s lexical entry specifies how the meaning of the
adjunct should be integrated into the joint meaning of the governor, its
complements, and its lower-scoped adjuncts). As we will see later, this
distinction between arguments and modifiers applies to dependency
relations in morphology and discourse as well.
Figure 2 shows the primary dependency tree associated with the
sentence “It had forced her to give up all she had worked for” (the arrows
at the top), along with arrows representing secondary dependencies and
anaphor-antecedent relations (the arrows at the bottom). The root word in
the sentence – the word “had2”, which is the only word without any
incoming arrows – is shown in bold.
Figure 2. A primary dependency tree (top) augmented with secondary

dependencies and antecedent-anaphor relations (below)
The arrows point from governor to dependent, with the relation name
written either at the arrow tip, or in the middle of the arrow if a word has
more than one incoming arrow. For example, the arrow from “had2” to “It1”
identifies “It” as the subject (“subj”) of “had”, and the arrow from
“forced3” to “to5” identifies the phrase headed by “to” as the prepositional
object (“pobj”) of “forced”. The primary dependency relations are
organised in a relation hierarchy in which the relations are classified as
either complement or adjunct relations. The syntactic annotation scheme
currently includes approximately 20 complement relations and 60 adjunct

relations. The fifteen most frequent complement and adjunct relations are
listed in Table 1.
The primary dependency structure induces a phrase structure in
which every word heads an associated phrase consisting of all words that
can be reached from the word by following the arrows in the primary
dependency structure. For example, in Figure 2, “worked11” heads the
phrase “worked11 for12”; “had10” heads the phrase “she9 had10 worked11
for12”; and “It1” heads the phrase “It1”.
Table 1. The fifteen most frequent complement and adjunct relations in the
syntactic annotation with examples
Complement relations - top 15 Adjunct relations - top 15

nobj (nominal object: for thenobj pnct (punctuation: Itsubj is !pnct)
childnobj) attrr (restrictive attributive: la tareanobj
subj (subject: Theysubj saw medobj) difícilattrr )
vobj (verbal object: Hesubj had leftvobj conj (conjunct: John andcoord Maryconj)
itdobj) coord (coordinator: Tea orcoord
dobj (direct object: Hesubj left usdobj) coffeeconj)
pobj (prepositional obj.: one ofpobj attrd (descriptive attributive: la
themnobj) difícilattrd tareanobj)
preds (subject predic.: Itsubj was time (time adverbial: Wesubj leave
bluepreds) nowtime)
possd (possessed: His hatpossd) loc (location adverbial: Isubj fell hereloc)
possr (possessor: Peterpossr ’s hatpossd) man (manner adverbial: Isubj read
lobj (locative object: living inlobj slowlyman)
Romenobj) degr (degree adverbial: verydegr hard)
qobj (quotational object: Hesubj said: neg (negation: Isubj will notneg leavevobj)
“pnct Noqobj ”pnct) namef (first name: Igornamef Stravinsky)
expl (expletive: Thereexpl arises onedobj relr (restrictive relative clause: the
questionnobj) catnobj thatsubj diedrelr)
predo (object predicative: Wesubj found appr (restrictive apposition: the
itdobj disappointingpredo) geniusnobj Einsteinappr)
iobj (indirect object: Wesubj gave himiobj appa (parenthetic apposition: Einstein,
flowersdobj) theappa geniusnobj)
avobj (adverbial object: as beforeavobj) list (list sequence: Johnson,
part (verbal particle: break uppart) Oklahomalist)
The arrows in the primary dependency structure are allowed to cross, so

discontinuous word orders such as topicalisations and extrapositions do not
require special treatment, as exemplified by the discontinuous dependency
tree in Figure 3 in which the relative clause headed by “was7” has been
extraposed from the direct object and placed after the time adverbial
“today5”.
Figure 3. A discontinuous (non-projective) dependency tree with crossing arrows
In addition to the primary dependency structure, the CDT analyses encode

secondary dependencies (shown in the bottom part of the analyses along
with anaphoric links). In a secondary dependency, a word (called the
licensor) generates a phonetically empty copy of a second word (the
secondary dependent) which can then function as a dependent of a third
word (the secondary governor); loosely speaking, the licensor allows the
word to function as a secondary dependent of the secondary governor.
These secondary relations are encoded by means of an arrow from the
secondary governor to the secondary dependent, with the relation name
enclosed in square brackets. For example, the relative clause verb “had10”
in Figure 2 allows the phrase “all8” to function as a secondary nominal
object (“[nobj]”) of the preposition “for12”; it also allows the word “she9” to
function as a secondary subject (“[subj]”) of “worked11”.
2.3. Morphology
The morphological annotation in the CDT treebanks focuses exclusively on

derivation and composition, since inflectional morphology can be detected
and analysed automatically with high precision for the languages in the
treebank. The complex internal structure of words and word-like phrases is
encoded as a dependency tree which can be specified in two different ways:
either as an ordinary dependency tree (the dependency notation in Figure 4,
left) or by means of an abstract specification of how the dependency tree
for a morphologically complex word is constructed from roots annotated as

lemmas in combination with morphological operators (the operator
notation in Figure 4, right). In other words, the dependency notation
specifies the tree directly, whereas the operator notation indicates how the
tree can be constructed from a set of operators. In the treebank annotation,
we use the dependency notation to encode dependency structure between
tokens in the automatically produced word tokenisation, while the operator
notation is employed to encode dependency structure within tokens.
Figure 4. Morphological analysis annotated in dependency notation (left) and

operator notation (right)
In the operator notation, the dependency tree for a stem is annotated as a

root given abstractly by means of its lemma followed by one or more
morphological operators: “lemma op1 op2...” The operators are applied in
order, and each operator encodes an abstract affix and a specification of
how the abstract affix combines with the base (root or complex stem) in its
scope. Here, abstract affix is used to denote either a traditional affix or the
non-head constituent in a compound. A root or stem may be followed by an
optional word-class specification “@wordclass”, indicating a non-standard
word class of the stem or modifier (e.g., “pay@V +[back@Adv]/ASPEC:
resul @N” as an extreme example).
An operator has the form “pos affix/type”. The field pos specifies
whether the abstract affix is attached to its base in prefix position (“−”),
infix position (“~”), suffix position (“+”), or a combination of these (e.g.
“−~”, “~+”). The field type semantically and functionally identifies the type
and, where relevant, the subtype, of the dependency relation that links the
base with the abstract affix (e.g., “PRED:agent”). Finally, the field affix
specifies the abstract affix and its possibly complex internal structure. The
abstract affix may be encoded either as a simple string representing a
simple affix or a simple root (e.g., “er”, “arbejd”), or as a complex string of
the form “[stem]” or “[stem]interfix”, where “stem” encodes the internal
structure of the abstract affix in operator notation (e.g., “[arbejd@N]s” or

“[arbejde@V +r/PRED:agent]”). The interfix is a phonetically induced
morpheme whose only function is to act as a glue between the base and the
abstract affix. The abstract affix is assumed to function as a dependent of
the base, unless it is transformational in terms of triggering word class
change or a significant change of meaning, in which case the headedness is
reversed so that the base is assumed to function as a dependent of the
abstract affix.
The most important relation types in the morphological annotation
are listed in Table 2 below (the examples are not always fully analysed, i.e.,
the real treebank annotation sometimes includes other derivational
structures in addition to the exemplified relation). In the table, relation
types with head-switching are italicised; the distinction between argument
and modifier relations is not shown. The inventory of relations is inspired
by Varela & Martín García (1999), Rainer (1999), and Müller (2006).
Examples (3) to (6) below show how the operator notation can be
used to encode the dependency structure of complex words.
(3) antihéroe ‘antihero’ héroe −anti/NEG:oppo
In (3), the Spanish word “antihéroe” is constructed from the root “héroe”
by attaching the prefix “anti” as a “NEG:oppo” dependent of the root. The
NEG:oppo relation indicates that “anti” negates the meaning of “héroe” so
that the new word acquires the opposite meaning of the base.
(4) repayment pay −re/ASPEC:iter +ment/PRED:core
In (4), the word “repayment” is constructed from the root “pay” by first
indicating iterative aspect by attaching the prefix “re” to “pay”, and then
transforming “repay” into a predicative eventive core noun by means of the
transformative suffix “ment” which takes “repay” as its dependent.
Table 2. The main relation types in the morphological annotation (relation types
with head-switching are italicised)
Relations that typically appear with prefixes

LOC:pos (position: intramural = mural −intra/LOC:pos)
LOC:dir (direction/origin: deverbal = verbal −de/LOC:dir)
TIME:prec (temporal precedence: prehistorical = historical −pre/TIME:prec)
TIME:succ (temporal succession: postmodernism = modernism −post/TIME:succ)
NEG:oppo (opposition: antihero = hero −anti/NEG:oppo)
NEG:priv (privation: desalt = salt −de/NEG:priv)
GRAD:size (size/quantity: minibar = bar −mini/GRAD:size)
GRAD:qual (quality: supercomputer = computer −super/GRAD:qual)
ASPEC:rev (reversion: deactivate = activate −de/ASPEC:rev)
ASPEC:iter (iterative: redefine = define −re/ASPEC:iter)
ASPEC:cause (causative: acallar ‘silence’ = callar −a/ASPEC:cause)
ASPEC:reflex (reflexive: autopilot = pilot −auto/ASPEC:reflex)
ASPEC:term (terminative: oplåse ‘open’ = låse −op/ASPEC:term)
ASPEC:resul (resultative: fastnagle ‘rivet’ = nagle −fast/ASPEC:resul)
MOD:quant (quantification: multicultural = cultural −multi/MOD:quant)
MOD:man (manner: uneducated = educated −un/MOD:man)
MOD:qual (qualification: paleochristian = christian −paleo/MOD:qual)
TRANS (transitivising: påsejle ‘colide’: sejle −på/TRANS)
Relations that typically appear with suffixes
AUG (augmentative: perrazo ’big dog’ = perro +azo/AUG)
DIM (diminutive: viejecito ’little old man’ = viejo +ecito/DIM)
PEJ (pejorative: vinacho ’bad vine’ = vino +acho/PEJ)
DER:nv (noun→verb derivation: salar 'to salt' = sal +ar/DER:nv)
DER:av (adjective→verb derivation: darken = dark +en/DER:av)
DER:vv (verb→verb derivation: adormecer ’lull to sleep’ = dormir
−+[a][ecer]/DER:vv)
PRED:agent (agent derivation: singer = sing +er/PRED:agent)
PRED:core (core derivation: exploitation = exploit@V +ation/PRED:core)
QUAL (deadjectival noun: bitterness = bitter +ness/QUAL)
NOPRED:agent (agent derivation: miller = mill +er/NOPRED:agent)
NOPRED:cont (container derivation: azucarero ‘sugar bowl’ = azucar
+ero/NOPRED:cont)
DEVERB:pas.poten (deverbal adjective: transportable = transport
+able/DEVERB:pas.poten)
DENOM:rel.norm (denominal adjective): presidential = president
+ial/DENOM:rel.norm)
Relations that typically appear with compounds
CONST (constitutive: træbord ‘wooden table’ = bord −træ/CONST)
AGENT (agent: politikontrol ‘police control’ = kontrol −politi/AGENT)
ORIGIN (origin: rørsukker ‘cane sugar’ = sukker −rør/ORIGIN)
FUNC (function: krigsskib ‘war ship’ = skib −[krig]s/FUNC)
POS (position: loftlampe ‘ceiling lamp’ = lampe −loft/POS)
TIME (time: oktoberregn ‘October rain’ = regn −oktober/TIME)
ABOUT (theme: skattelov ‘tax law’ = lov −[skat]te/ABOUT)
(5) arbejdsgiver ’employer’ give +r/PRED:agent −[arbejde@N]s/dobj.patient
In (5), the Danish word “arbejdsgiver” is constructed from the verb “give”
(“give”) by turning it into the agent nominalisation (PRED:agent) “giver”,
headed by the transformative suffix “r”, and then specifying the direct
object (patient) role of “giver” by means of the prefix dependent
“arbejde@N” with interfix “s”, where “arbejde@N” denotes the noun
reading of “arbejde”. (In Danish “arbejde” exists both as a noun and as a
verb.)
(6) arbejderkrav ’worker demand’ krav −[arbejde@V +r/PRED:agent]/AGENT
In (6), the Danish word “arbejderkrav” (“worker’s demand”) is constructed

from the root noun “krav” (“demand”) by combining it with the complex
stem “arbejder” by means of an AGENT composition relation.
2.4. Discourse
Just like sentence structures can be seen as dependency trees linking

sentence parts such as morphemes and words, discourse structures can be
seen as dependency trees linking discourse parts such as sentences and
fragments of sentences separated by full stops. The CDT discourse
annotation is strongly inspired by Rhetorical Structure Theory (e.g. Mann
& Thompson 1987, Matthiessen & Thompson 1988) and the discourse
annotation in the Penn Discourse Treebank (Prasad et al. 2008a/b; Webber
2004, 2006). A multi-level approach to discourse annotation that resembles
our annotation scheme in many respects is found in Mladová et al. (2008).
In our view, the single-level approach followed by Rhetorical
Structure Theory (RST) and the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDT) results in
an overly restrictive view of discourse structure. For example, RST and
PDT only consider relations between entire discourse segments, typically
clauses, and the PDT annotation only allows for relations between adjacent
segments. In contrast, the CDT annotation allows for more precise analyses
owing to (i) the unification with the syntax level, which permits
annotations of relations between a text segment and a single word or
phrase, cf. example (2); (ii) the possibility of discontinuous dependencies,
which permits analyses of relations between non-adjacent segments, as in
example (2) or in direct or indirect speech separated by attribution text

spans.
Furthermore, neither RST nor PDT distinguishes between sentence
internal and sentence external relations, but generally include in their
analyses clauses that belong to the same rhetorical text sequence. As a
consequence of the above, many of the relations investigated by RST and
PDT are dealt with at the syntax level in CDT, typically as adverbial
adjuncts, our model operating with 32 different types. The CDT discourse
annotation therefore focuses exclusively on sentence external relations,
including main clauses separated by a colon or semicolon, see Section 4.2.
This also means that the inventory of CDT discourse relations differs from
the mutually dissimilar RST and PDT inventories. At this point, we have
established the primary discourse relations listed in Table 3 below. Those
marked with “:*” are abstract types that have a total of 21 subtypes, which
are not shown in the table, e.g. “ELAB:exem” for exemplification and
“CAUSE:goal” for goal.
Most of the relations have a natural choice of head (nucleus) and
dependent (satellite). However, the last five relations are essentially multi-
nuclear, i.e., there is no natural choice of head. In the case of CONJ,
CONTR, DISJ and JOINT, the two nuclei are merely coordinated. In the
case of QUEST, the two segments presuppose each other (Halliday &
Hasan 1976: 4). In these relations, the arrows by convention point from the
first occurring nucleus to the second one, and “dependency” should not be
understood in the sense of a hierarchical relation, but in the sense of a
linear relation in which the second segment depends on the first segment
simply because it comes last in the textual order. All discourse relations are
assumed to be modifier relations.
In order to clearly distinguish between the discourse and syntax
levels, the main type in a discourse relation is written with capital letters,
whereas subtypes are written with lower-case letters following a colon, e.g.
“CAUSE:reas” (reason). In several mono-nuclear relations, the labels are
identical to those of adverbial adjuncts at the syntax level. This link
between syntax and discourse is by no means coincidental: in fact, mono-
nuclear satellites which are textualised as independent sentences in a
Germanic language are frequently incorporated into a single large sentence
in a Romance language.
Table 3. The main relation types in the discourse annotation with examples
(dependent sentence is underlined)
CAUSE:* (cause: We should be ashamed of the state of our schools. We are one of
the world’s richest countries.)
CONC (concession: I know we haven’t known each other for long. Will you marry
me?)
COND (condition: OK, I will help you. On the condition that this never happens
again.)
CONS:* (consequence: In three years many of the DSB ferries will have to seek new
waters. An exciting story will be history.)
CONSOL:* (consolidation: One of the country’s legal experts in cooperative
housing is Svend Trangeled. According to him the greatest problems lie in
partnership arrangements.)
DESCR:* (description: Let’s go to your place, she said. She was different than I
thought.)
ELAB:* (elaboration: She was different than I thought. In the taxi she put her head
on my shoulder.)
INTACT:* (interactional signals: – There is something I would like to ask you. –
Yes?)
PREPAR (preparation, headline: A permanent job. I am so happy that I do not have
to go on welfare again, says Lisa…)
TIME:* (temporal: The Ministry of the Interior expects this part of the job to be
concluded before 2010. Then the Ministry and the national board of health will
consider whether the work is to be conducted further.)
CONJ:* (conjunction: The bank’s director was sentenced to six months in prison.
Two board members were acquitted.)
CONTR:* (contrast: The societal savings are not immediately visible. But it is a fact
that new drugs will minimise the overall health cost.)
DISJ (disjunction: Are you coming up now? Or are you going to stay in bed all day?)
JOINT (no clear discourse relation: We are hungry and are refused by all
restaurants. On a side street a façade is blinking in green neon.)
QUEST:* (question/answer sequence: Why did he say that? I have no idea.)
Inspired by the Penn Discourse Treebank (especially Webber 2004, 2006

and Prasad et al. 2006), we annotate explicit and implicit connectives as
well as attribution. Explicit connectives are specified in the dependency
label after a slash sign, e.g. “CAUSE:reas/because”. Implicit but inferable
connectives are specified between parentheses, e.g. “CAUSE:reas/(be-
cause)”. The attribution of direct speech, indirect speech, thoughts, hopes,
ideas, etc. is encoded with an “/ATTR” following the relation label and, in
case of more than one speaker, with “/ATTR1”, “/ATTR2”, etc. Although
less detailed than the attribution system in PDT, this system captures much
of the same information.
Since discourse is generally extremely open to doubts, misunder-

standings and ambiguity, there is often more than one interpretation of the
discourse, and hence also more than one annotation of the relation. The
CDT annotation therefore allows relations to be combined by means of “|”
and “&”, to signal doubt between two relations and double meaning,
respectively.
In addition to the primary discourse relations, we also annotate
anaphoric links as arrows pointing from the antecedent to the anaphor (or
from the postcedent to the cataphor, in the case of cataphors). Like
secondary dependency relations in syntax, these relations are shown in the
bottom part of the analyses, as illustrated in Figure 1. The inventory of
anaphoric relations is shown in Table 4. We distinguish between
coreferential and associative anaphors. Coreferential anaphors (coref-*)
refer to the same entity as their antecedent, whereas associative anaphors
(assoc-*) refer to an entity which is associated with the antecedent by
means of a lexico-semantic or pragmatic relation.
Table 4. Anaphoric relations in the CDT discourse annotation
ref (syntactically bound coreference)
coref (coreferential pronouns)

coref-id (NP with lexically identical antecedent)
coref-var (NP with lexical variation: a car → the vehicle)
coref-prg (NP indicating speech act: I shall be back tomorrow → the
threat / the promise / the warning)
coref-res (resumptive anaphors: John sold his car → that / that sale)
coref-part (partial coreference: a bouquet of flowers → the roses)
assoc (associative pronouns: We went to a restaurant. → They [= the

waiters] were very quick in serving us)
assoc-const (refers to constitutive part of antecedent: a car → the engine /
the windscreen)
assoc-agent (refers to agentive entity: a car → the factory / the manufac-
turer)
assoc-form (refers to form of antecedent: a car → the shape / the size)
assoc-scope (refers to scope or purpose entity: a car → the chauffeur / the
passengers)
assoc-loc (the anaphor is located in the antecedent: a village → the church
/ the inn)
assoc-cause (anaphors such as for this reason, on this basis, where the
antecedent is the preceding text segment)
2.5. Translational equivalence
In order to extend the CDT annotation system to translations, we need to

specify the translational equivalences between the source and target texts,
i.e., the minimal word groups in the source and target language that
correspond to each other with respect to meaning or function. In a
dependency-based theory, these equivalences can be encoded straight-
forwardly by means of a many-to-many word alignment, in which a group
of (possibly non-contiguous) source words is aligned to a group of target
words. Special properties of the alignment are encoded with an inventory
of approximately 20 alignment relations. The most important ones are
listed in Table 5.
Table 5. The most important alignment relations
none (normal alignment)

d (change in determination: bread ↔ the bread)
e (translation error: 1978 ↔ 1987)
f (free/fuzzy translation: that day ↔ that morning)
lv (lexical variation – change of lexeme with same referent: Maria ↔ the girl)
mv (morphological variation – change in inflection: see section 4.2)
mc (morph. change – change in word class: Upon his arrival ↔ When he arrived)
n (change in number: his contribution ↔ his contributions)
s (syntactic alignment – syntactic marker aligns with subsegment: “dagen (day-the)”↔
“the day”: normal alignment “dagen” ↔ “day”, s-alignment “dagen” ↔ “the”)
wo (marked change in word order: John arrived early that morning ↔ That morning,
John arrived early: see section 4.2)
Deletions (implicitations) are encoded as alignments in which a group of

source words is aligned with itself, and similarly for added text
(explicitations). In this way, a complete CDT analysis of a source text and
its translation can be given by means of monolingual CDT analyses of the
source and target texts, coupled with a word alignment that links the two
monolingual analyses. Figure 5 gives an example of this kind of analysis,
in which the English source text is shown at the top, the Danish translation
at the bottom, and the word alignment in between the two analyses.
Figure 5. A complete CDT analysis of a translation with source analysis (top),

target analysis (bottom), and word alignment (middle)
3. Searching the treebanks
The treebanks can be searched for linguistic constructions that match a

given set of criteria by means of the DTAG dependency treebank
annotation tool (Kroman 2003). Nodes in the graph are represented by
variables of the form “$node” (alignment edges are encoded as nodes as
well), and queries express a set of conditions that the node variables must
satisfy. The most important query types are explained below.
z node1 @ node2 and node1 @ pattern node2 hold if node1 is aligned to

node2 by means of an alignment edge whose type matches pattern.
Patterns are either names which must be matched exactly, or regular
expressions.
z node1 pattern node2 holds if there is an arc from node1 to node2
whose type matches pattern.

z feature =~ pattern holds if feature matches pattern. A feature of the
form node represents the position associated with the node in numerical
contexts and the string associated with node in string contexts, and the
feature node[name] represents the value of attribute name at node.
z number1 numop number2 holds if the numerical operator numop

holds between number1 and number2. Numerical operators include
equality, less-than, greater-than, etc. as well as the adjacency operators
“<<” (one before) and “>>” (one after). Numbers can be given as
integers or node features.
z Complex queries can be formed by means of the logical operators
“and”, “or”, “not”, “exists”, “all”.
For example, the DTAG query:
(6) find ( $X[lemma] =~ /^there$/ ) and ( $X expl $Y ) and ( $Y < $X )
finds all occurrences of the expletive word $X with lemma “there” which
has been analysed as an “expl” dependent of a preceding word $Y. The
DTAG query language makes it easy to search a parallel treebank for
particular phenomena, allowing linguists to find quantitative and qualitative
corpus-based evidence for linguistic hypotheses that would be difficult to
investigate otherwise.
4. Examining linguistic hypotheses
By means of the DTAG query language, the CDT treebanks can be used to
prove or disprove a wide range of linguistic hypotheses. The following two
sections outline such hypotheses, one for NP structure and one for
discourse.
4.1. NP structure
A frequently observed difference between Germanic and Romance

languages is that Germanic languages often use compounding to express
what Romance languages convey by a derivational strategy (Bally 1932,
Rainer & Varela 1992). This means that many simple and derived words in
Spanish have compounds as their translational equivalents in Danish, cf.
(7) and (8) below.
Derivation → compound
(7a) escritorio – skrivebord ‘writing desk’ (escribir: ‘write’)
(7b) dentadura – tandsæt ‘set of teeth’ (diente: ‘tooth’)
(7c) petrolero – olietankskib/oliehandler ‘oil dealer/oil tanker’ (petróleo: ‘oil’)
Simple noun → compound

(8a) berberecho – hjertemusling ‘cockle’
(8b) búho – hornugle ‘horned owl’
(8c) púlpito – prædikestol ‘pulpit’
We believe that we can account for this cross-linguistic contrast by means

of the following lexical-typological hypothesis.
Romance (exocentric) mainly artefact-denoting nouns are in general
more contentful and precise with respect to their lexical meaning than the
corresponding Germanic (endocentric) ones. (For an account of the
typological theory of endocentric and exocentric languages, see e.g.
Herslund & Baron 2005.) Romance artefact-denoting nouns tend to
lexicalise the semantic component figure, i.e. the shape, dimensionality and
structure of the object. By contrast, Germanic artefact-denoting nouns tend
to lexicalise only the component function, which is an inherent abstract
feature of any artefact-denoting noun. The exclusive focus in the Germanic
languages on the purpose of the object, or non-focus on its form, means
that Germanic simple nouns are in many cases semantically vague. This
allows them to function as denominations on a generic prototype level, i.e.
a general hyperonymic level, which does not have any corresponding form
in the Romance languages.
In particular, when Danish speakers need a level below the general
hyperonymic one, they usually achieve it by means of nominal compounds
as shown in (9). The Danish noun tæppe (‘carpet’) represents lexicalisation
on the family level, whereas Spanish nouns must denote subtypes, i.e.
objects on a hyponymic level (for Italian, see e.g. Korzen 2008).
(9) Danish Spanish lit. transl.

tæppe [Ø] −
sengetæppe colcha ‘bed –’
vægtæppe tapiz ‘wall –’
ægte tæppe alfombra ‘genuine –’
væg-til-væg tæppe moqueta ‘wall to wall –’
teatertæppe/ scenetæppe telón ‘theater/ stage –’
slumretæppe manta ‘slumber –’
We assume that Danish has to use the compounding system in order to

designate entities on a hyponymic level because of the semantic vagueness
of Danish simple nouns and their subsequent lexicalisation on a
hyperonymic family level. In other words, composition should be very
frequent in Danish as compared with Spanish, and thus we would expect it
to be incorporated into the grammatical system as a highly automated
morphological word-formation process.
By contrast, Spanish simple nouns are already saturated in a
semantic sense, so the Spanish language does not need, and has not
developed, a full morphological system to deal with this information-
packaging task. Either the semantic components are already encapsulated
in the simple noun or an alternative strategy is used, namely derivation.
Although phrasal composition of the [N prep. N]-type is also often a
prerequisite for creating subtype-denoting lexical expressions in the
Romance languages, it can be regarded as an addition to the derivational
system and semantically contentful nouns. Therefore composition in the
Romance languages has not been routinised as part of a morphological
system.
This hypothesis is debatable for a number of reasons; we shall
restrict ourselves to mentioning a few general ones: (i) the general
characterisation of Danish nouns as semantically weak is postulated on the
basis of a specific sub-set of nouns, namely those that denote artefacts and
typically appear to be equivalent to Spanish simple or derived forms; (ii) it
is not immediately evident that a generalisation obtained from this sub-set
is valid for all Danish compounds, which in many cases can have heads
with lexically strong meanings; (iii) the status of Romance [N prep. N]-
constructions is unclear as to whether and in which cases they should be
regarded as compounds or free syntactic phrase formations, as the criteria
for compounding are not universal or language independent.
In CDT, the combination of morphological annotation and alignment
of parallel texts allows us to make specific inquiries into the assumed
morphological correlation so that we can either substantiate our hypothesis
statistically, reject it, or provide qualitative data that can lead to its
refinement and, generally, new insights into morphological cross-linguistic
contrasts. Also, the CDT annotation of several Romance and Germanic
languages provides data for a more detailed and differentiated assessment

of typological variations in the morphological structure of the languages in
question. Finally, in order to address the specific problem of Romance
phrase formation vs. compounding, the CDT marks all word-like phrases
with a hash symbol and decomposes all solid compounds, which will
provide us with a firm foundation for “solving the puzzle” of Romance
word formation by means of free morphemes.
4.2. Discourse
Romance syntax and discourse generally appears to be more complex and

hypotactic than Scandinavian syntax and discourse. Romance sentences
tend to be longer and to contain more information, and Romance discourse
structure is more hierarchical, i.e., more characterised by structural fore-
ground-background distinctions rendered for example by finite vs. non-
finite verb forms.
These differences have been documented in various linguistic studies
(e.g. Korzen 2003, 2006), but we expect the CDT combination of discourse
annotation and alignment of parallel texts to be able to provide us with a
much more precise picture of the situation. For example, the CDT
annotation can be used to examine the higher frequency of non-finite verb
forms in Romance because it can be used to detect all changes from finite
to non-finite verbs and vice versa.
The examples below are typical of translations from Danish into
Italian (10) to (12) and from Italian into Danish (13):
(10) Den sidste der kommer – L’ultimo a venire… [infinitive]

‘The last one who is coming’ – ‘The last one to come’
(11) Han kom og bad om en is – Arrivò chiedendo un gelato. [gerund]

‘He came and asked for an ice cream’ – ‘He came asking for an ice cream’
(12) Da han kom til Rom, blev han syg – Arrivato a Roma, si ammalò. [participle]
‘When he came to Rome, he became ill’ – ‘[Having] arrived in Rome, he
became ill.
(13) Nato nel 1947, ... – Han blev født i 1947, og … [finite verb]
‘Born in 1947, …’ – ‘He was born in 1947, and …’.
The CDT annotation will provide very precise answers regarding the
frequency of such changes between verb forms (as well as changes between
word classes) and the contexts in which they occur, and will also inform us
whether particular verb types, text types or discourse relations occur more
frequently than others in specific morphological data.
Another important difference between the Scandinavian and
Romance languages, linked to differences in sentence length, is the
different use of paragraph change and punctuation marks. Together with
longer sentences, there seems to be a tendency, at least in some text types,
also to use longer paragraphs in Romance languages while Scandinavian
texts tend to subdivide the content into smaller units. Furthermore, the
higher proportion of long sentences can be linked – among many other
things – to a much more frequent use (especially in French and Italian) of
the colon and semicolon in cases where a Danish text would select a full
stop. But these phenomena need much more investigation, and therefore
the CDT discourse annotation distinguishes between different kinds of
sentence and main clause adjoining. If a full stop coincides with a change
of paragraph, the sign + is added to the name of the discourse relation. A
very frequent relation is the simple conjunction, cf. Table 3, so that a
relatively common discourse relation label is “+CONJ/(and)”. Usually a
connective is not rendered explicit in these cases, hence the parentheses
around “and”.
Differences in the use of punctuation marks will automatically be
detected in CDT, as the system includes an individual annotation of
punctuation marks at the syntactic level, cf. Figure 1 (units 4, 20, 25 and
30), and the cross-linguistic alignment in Figure 5 (units 5/15 and 10/21).
But in addition to that, since the use of colon and semicolon varies
particularly between the Scandinavian and Romance languages, CDT
discourse annotation adds a colon or semicolon to the relation in cases
where two main clauses are separated by a colon or a semicolon, e.g.
“:CONJ/(and)”, “;CONJ/(and)”.
A final issue concerns differences in word order, where a particularly
interesting phenomenon is the Romance tendency to begin sentences with a
time, place or modal adverbial vs. the Danish tendency to begin sentences
with the subject – a phenomenon which to our knowledge has not yet been
investigated. Such cases can be detected effortlessly by means of the CDT
annotation and will therefore be easy to search for and analyse both
quantitatively and qualitatively once the treebank annotation is complete.
5. Conclusion
In this paper, we have described the main aspects of the annotation scheme
in the Copenhagen Dependency Treebanks, and demonstrated that a unified
scheme solves many of the consistency problems that arise if the
annotations are performed separately. We have argued that treebanks are an
important resource for research in linguistics, psycholinguistics and
translation studies, and outlined several linguistic hypotheses about
translations and contrastive linguistics that can be explored with the CDT
treebanks.
6. Acknowledgments
This work was supported by grants from the Danish Research Council for
the Humanities and the Copenhagen Business School. The translation work
has been kindly co-sponsored by the Danish translation company Lingtech.
We thank Lotte Jelsbech Knudsen, Morten Gylling, and the other CDT
annotators for many fruitful discussions.
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Triangulating product and process data:
quantifying alignment units with keystroke data
Michael Carl
[B]y testing hypotheses based on qualitative data against quantitative data, and vice
versa, I believe we can soon begin to make stronger and more informed guesses about
translation. (Jakobsen 1999, 19)
Abstract
The paper discusses a method to triangulate process and product data. We

suggest converting Translog data into a relational format which contains
both process and product data. We outline how this representation allows
us to retrieve and correlate the various dimensions of the data more easily.
The concept of Alignment Unit (AU) is introduced and contrasted with that
of Translation Unit (TU). While AUs refer to translation equivalences in the
source and target texts of the product data, TUs refer to cognitive entities that
can be observed in the process data. With an (almost) exhaustive fragmen-
tation of the source and target texts into AUs, we are able to distribute and
allocate the entire set of keystroke data to appropriate AUs. Using the prop-
erties of the keystroke data, AUs are quantified in a novel way which enables
us to visualise and investigate the structure of translation production on a
fine-grained scale.
1 Introduction
Triangulation is the application of combined research methodologies, theo-

ries, or data sources to double (or triple) check scientific results: “If observa-
tions of comparable phenomena remain stable and convergent from the per-
spective of different methods, the possibility that they are mere artefacts are
reduced.” (Jakobsen 1999, 18ff) By combining multiple observations, theo-
ries, methods, and empirical evidence, one can hope to overcome the biases
of a single method.
225
226 Michael Carl
Figure 1. The Figure represents the dimensions of the User Activity Data (UAD): on the left
the product data and on the right side the process data. Both types of data provide different
aspects of the translation session.
Jakobsen (2006) suggests methodological triangulation of Translog key-

board data to be used and verified against retrospective interviews, TAPs,
video/audio recordings, screen recording, and eye tracking in order to achieve
“more informed guesses about translation”; he also mentions a “within
method triangulation” in which, for instance “quantitative time-delay data
[would be checked] against typing speed data, etc.” (Jakobsen 1999, 19)
Since methodological triangulation requires additional hardware and
a large synchronisation overhead and introduces technical problems which
occur when combining heterogeneous media, we here suggest a ‘within
method’ for Translog process and product data, which is also referred to as
data triangulation, and show some of the potentials it has of detecting and
quantifying dependencies.
“Translog is a computer program that logs keyboard activity involved
in making a translation” (Jakobsen 1999, 1) and its output contains both the
product and the process data that emerges during a translation session. In
previous publications (Carl et al. 2008; Carl and Jakobsen 2009) we have
used the term User Activity Data (UAD) to subsume any kind of data which
is consulted or generated by a translator during a translation session. Figure 1
Triangulating product and process data 227
represents the relation between process and product data as it is currently pro-
duced by Translog. The left side shows the static part of the UAD, the source
text (ST) and the target text (TT), together with their correspondence links.
The right side plots the dynamic process data which consists of keyboard
actions and gaze behaviour. According to Jakobsen (2006, 104):
The keystroke data can be interpreted quantitatively and unambiguously in terms of
either text production, text elimination or cursor navigation [. . . ] actions. [. . . ] This
means that the keystroke record is also immediately interpretable in terms of linguistic
units (letters, words, clauses, etc.) giving the researcher full access to studying the
typing process by which a text is produced.
While this statement is certainly true, the notion of “word” or “clause” in

the second part of the implication is unsatisfactory in a translation context, for
instance when two ST words are translated into one, or a coherent ST segment
is transformed into a discontinuous sequence in the TT. The monolingual
entities do not immediately reveal the cross-linguistic dependencies which
we want to study.
Translog itself only provides “a simple calculation of the total number
of keystrokes and the number of text production keystrokes” (Jakobsen 2006,
104). This is certainly not sufficient to study translation processes in detail,
but it is stated that “utility software” can be created that automatically seg-
ments a logfile into suitable units. Below such a utility software is suggested
which segments the product data into “Alignment Units” (AUs) and triangu-
lates those units with keystroke process data.
An alignment indicates “which parts of the source text correspond with
which parts of the target text” (Dagan et al. 1993, 1). A Translation Unit
(TU), in contrast, reflects, for some, entities of cognitive processes or the
“translator’s focus of attention at a given time in the translation process”
(Alves and Vale 2009, 254). This definition implies that TUs are dynamic
units that change over time, so that the same ST word may successively be
part of different TUs. Thus, the term ‘TU’ seems to refer to sequences of
activities which may be observed in the process data, while we will use AUs
to indicate translation correspondences in the static product data.
While we do not exactly know what TUs actually are,1 the problem is
less serious for AUs. It is possible to align single words and continuous or
discontinuous sequences of m-to-n words even across sentences boundaries.
AUs are usually not below word level, AUs are likely to be shorter than TUs,
1
See Alves and Vale (2009) and Dragsted (2004, 14ff) for excellent overviews of different usages of the
term ‘TU’.
228 Michael Carl
and AUs can be directly observed, discussed and in most cases agreed upon
between different annotators. But most importantly, AUs do not change in
time and do not have the dynamic aspect that TUs have.
A large number of trainable alignment programs exist (e.g. Dagan et al.
1993, Och and Ney 2000, Kromann 2003, to name a few) which can be used
to (semi-) automatically align segments of a ST with their correspondences in
a TT. An isomorphism between AUs and TUs is often assumed in a machine
translation context, where aligned texts serve as a basis for the extraction of
TUs to be subsequently reused in the machine translation system.
It is, however, unclear whether and to what extent such an isomorphism
also exists in the case of human translation. One attempt to define TUs in hu-
man translation process data has been undertaken by Dragsted (2004). With
the intention to detect TUs on the basis of long pauses between keystrokes,
Dragsted (2004, 142) states that “[i]ntuitively, the TU must contain both SL
and TL elements”. She comes to a number of conclusions about the length (in
words) of TUs under different conditions. However, a differentiation between
TUs and AUs might be instrumental in dealing with inconsistent segmenta-
tion in the product and process data. For instance, the Danish-English AU:
“er det planen ↔ we expect” shows a long translation pause in the process
data between “we” and “expect”, which indicates incompatible segmenta-
tion boundaries in both types of data. A distinction into separate TUs on the
process side and AUs on the product side would allow us to correlate and
“triangulate” these units without the need to give up or change definitions.
A systematic triangulation of TUs and AUs is beyond the scope of this
study. Rather, we shall prepare the ground for such an investigation and
correlate and quantify AUs as detected in the product data with keystroke
data. In order to do so in a systematic and automatic manner, we need to:
1. add further alignment information to define the AUs. We use the DTAG
software package2 which allows us to semi-automatically align the ST
and TT;
2. transform the Translog product and process data into a representation
which better reflects the phenomena which we want to investigate;
3. use a query language to retrieve all keystroke activities for each AU.
2
DTAG http://code.google.com/p/copenhagen-dependency-treebank/ is a project
aimed at creating linguistically annotated text collections (treebanks) on the basis of the dependency-based
grammar formalism Discontinuous Grammar. A number of mono- and bilingual semi-automatic annotation
and visualisation tools can be downloaded from the web site.
<W cur="0" top="76" btm="110" lft="1" rgt="107">Although</W>

<W cur="9" top="76" btm="110" lft="115" rgt="243">developing</W>
<W cur="20" top="76" btm="110" lft="251" rgt="359">countries</W>
<W cur="30" top="76" btm="110" lft="367" rgt="405">are</W>
<W cur="34" top="76" btm="110" lft="413" rgt="595">understandably</W>
Figure 2. The ST representation includes word information (i.e. the surface form of the
word), information on word location on the screen (i.e. the top-left and bottom-right pixel
positions of the box containing the word) and the word position in the text (i.e. the cursor
position of the word’s first letter).
<W cur="0" top="511" btm="544" lft="21" rgt="69">Selv</W>
<W cur="5" top="511" btm="544" lft="77" rgt="115">om</W>
<W cur="8" top="511" btm="544" lft="123" rgt="332">udviklingslandene</W>
<W cur="26" top="511" btm="544" lft="340" rgt="459">forståeligt</W>
<W cur="38" top="511" btm="544" lft="467" rgt="510">nok</W>
<W cur="42" top="511" btm="544" lft="518" rgt="542">er</W>
Figure 3. The TT representation is structurally identical to the ST representation, containing

information about words and their location.
An exhaustive fragmentation of the product data into AUs would then also
provide a framework for the study of the process data, since each keystroke
may be considered to contribute to one (or more) AU(s). The number and
distribution of keystrokes which fall into each AU constitute a novel way of
classification and a yet unstudied field of research.
In Section 2, we describe how we transform the Translog product data
into a format that makes it better suitable for the triangulation we are aiming
at. Section 3 describes how we transform the Translog keystroke data into
a format for better interrogation. The aim is to represent UAD in a kind of
relational data structure which allows us to automatically detect and correlate
the various dimensions of the product and process data. Section 4 outlines a
query language that allows us to relate the different dimensions of the data
in a formalised and exhaustive manner. Our particular aim is to correlate and
quantify AUs with keystroke data. Section 5 describes a special operator of
the query language which makes it possible to retrieve all keyboard activities
which belong to a given TT string. With these concepts we are ready to
discuss the triangulation of AUs and keystroke data in Section 6.
2 Product data
As outlined in Figure 1, the Translog output contains product and process

data, which is coded in XML. For our purposes, we have to transform the
230 Michael Carl
UAD into a representation that can be more easily correlated. The product
data consists of the ST and the TT, which can be extracted from the Translog
data.3 The representation we are aiming at is shown in Figures 2 and 3. In
addition we need alignment information to know which pieces in the SL text
correspond to which pieces of the TL text. We represent alignments as shown
in Figure 4.
<A src="0" tgt="0"/>

<A src="0" tgt="5"/>
<A src="9" tgt="8"/>
<A src="20" tgt="8"/>
<A src="30" tgt="42"/>
<A src="34" tgt="26"/>
Figure 4. Alignment information consists of m-to-n word correspondences between the ST

and the TT. The above representation shows four AUs which connect the ST in Figure 2 and
the TT in Figure 3. 1: “Although ↔ Selv om”, 2: “developing countries ↔ udviklingslan-
dene” 3: “are ↔ er”, and 4: “understandably ↔ forståeligt”. Note that “nok” in the Danish
text segment in Figure 3 is not aligned to any English ST word.
We have based our data triangulation experiments on four English-

Danish translation sessions and used the DTAG toolkit (Kromann 2003) to
semi-automatically align the translations of the four subjects. Table 1 sum-
marises properties of the translations and the number of aligned AUs. While
the English ST has 100 words4 and was identical in all cases, the length of the
translations varies between 101 and 112 words. Not all words in the product
data could be aligned (see Section 5 for more details) and in addition in some
cases several words were subsumed in one AU so that also the number of
AUs is different for each translation.
A2 K M S
Number of words in TT 102 101 112 101
Aligned words in TT 97 92 106 98
Aligned words in ST 100 97 98 96
Number of AUs 82 71 80 69
Table 1. Summary of properties of product data: number of words in the translations, number
of aligned words and number of AUs. The source text has 100 words, see Appendix.
3
The word location information in Figures 2 and 3 is only available in the Translog ‘premium’ version
(http://www.translog.dk/), which is also able to collect gaze data. In the ‘ordinary’ version, only the
cursor information is available which has to be extracted post-hoc from the log file.
4
The ST is reproduced in the Appendix
The translations were produced by professional translators and the texts were
manually aligned by three translation students with no particular instruction
as to how alignment should be done. The alignments were not analysed in
detail. The difference in number of AUs reflects their average number of
words, and may indicate a different perception of compositionality. Each
translation alignment took approximately 30 minutes and was in most cases
straightforward.
3 Keystroke data
As outlined in Jakobsen (1999, 2006) Translog logs all keyboard and mouse
activities. Different keyboard and/or mouse actions can be used for the inser-
tion and deletion of text, and for cursor navigation. For instance, deletions
can be achieved through backspace, or by pressing the delete key. A piece
of text can also be deleted by first highlighting it and then hitting the dele-
tion or backspace key or even by overwriting the highlighted sequence with
other characters. Highlighting of the text can, again, be achieved by various
means, e.g. by using the mouse button or by a combination of using shift and
left, right, up, or down keys, or even pressing shift control and left, right, up,
or down keys, etc. All these events are coded differently in Translog output.
The full information is needed to replay the translation session in a natural
way.
For an analysis of how a translation emerges, a more reduced representa-
tion is sufficient. We are likely to be not so much interested in how the cursor
was moved to a particular position in the text, but rather that it was there at a
particular point in time. We may also be not so much interested in knowing
whether a sequence was deleted by first highlighting it using the mouse or a
combination of keystrokes, or whether it was deleted using repeated delete
or backspace keys. Rather, for our intended analysis it is sufficient to ob-
serve that the sequence in question was deleted. For knowing what happens
to the text, we are basically only interested in knowing the insertions and the
deletions that take place at any point in time.
Figures 5, 6, and 7 show examples of the simplified key logging in-
formation: each line represents either an insertion or a deletion at a given
time (in ms, from the start of the translation session) and a cursor position in
the text where the action takes place. In the sequence of keystrokes in Fig-
ure 5, first the word “bør ” was written, then it was deleted and replaced by
232 Michael Carl
<K time="305229" type="ins" cur="568" str="b"/>

<K time="306187" type="ins" cur="569" str="ø"/>
<K time="306205" type="ins" cur="570" str="r"/>
<K time="306498" type="ins" cur="571" str=" "/>
<K time="308817" type="del" cur="568" str="bør "/>
<K time="308818" type="ins" cur="568" str="m"/>
<K time="308978" type="ins" cur="569" str="å"/>
Figure 5. The keyboard pattern represents a replacement of “bør ” by “må ”. We represent

the writing progression in S-notation: “[bør |1 ]1 {må}” where optionally indexed square
brackets represent deletions, curly brackets insertions and the underscore a blank space. The
break symbol “|1 ” indicates an interruption the writing progression at time 1. Note that
“bør ” was marked and deleted as one block at time 308817.

<K time="307812" type="ins" cur="693" str="m"/>
<K time="308613" type="ins" cur="695" str="d"/>
<K time="309209" type="ins" cur="696" str="e"/>
<K time="309211" type="del" cur="697" str="r"/>
<K time="309343" type="del" cur="696" str="e"/>
<K time="309915" type="del" cur="695" str="d"/>
<K time="310861" type="del" cur="694" str=" "/>
<K time="311147" type="ins" cur="694" str="å"/>
<K time="311481" type="ins" cur="696" str="d"/>
<K time="309209" type="ins" cur="697" str="e"/>
...
Figure 6. The example shows a correction pattern “ m[ der]å der” to insert an omitted
“å”. Single keystrokes are used rather than an entire block as in Figure 5. Curly brackets
around “{å der}” as well as the interruption symbol in an immediate correction may be left
out if they do not increase readability.
<K time="52551" type="del" cur="6" str="nødt "/>

...
<K time="55379" type="ins" cur="11" str="nødt "
refT="52551" refS="6" refE="11"/>
Figure 7. This is a delete & paste operation in which the word “nødt ” is moved from
cursor position 6 to cursor position 11.
“må ”. The caption of the figures also show the writing progression in the
S-notation as introduced by Kollberg (1998) and Perrin (2003). Notice that
the cursor positions for “b” and “m” are identical and the deletion operation
returns the cursor to the position where it was previously. Figure 6 shows
an example where an omitted “å” is inserted after “m” to produce “må” by
deleting the first four letters (including a blank space) of the following word
“derfor” that had already been typed.
Translog also allows the translator to use the clipboard, i.e. to copy a text
fragment into a buffer, and to paste it somewhere else in the text later. If the
copy operation is linked to a deletion of the fragment from the text (i.e. using
ctrl X), the action is represented as a deletion operation, while the pasted
fragment is represented as an insertion operation, as shown in Figure 7. In
order to keep track of the text’s origin, additional information is required with
the pasted segment. The time stamp of the copy operation (time=52551)
serves as a reference together with its starting and end cursor positions. This
allows us to trace back keystrokes of the moved segments, as outlined in
Section 6.
A2 K M S
insertions 1219 1361 1316 1579
deletions 118 112 261 204
Table 2: Summary of properties for keystroke data, number of insertions and deletions
Table 2 summarises the keyboard activities of the four participants. Fewest

keystrokes are counted for subject A2 and most for S. This is not consistent
with the length of the produced text, as in Table 1, but correlates with the
production time, see Figures 8 and 9.
Before looking into how keystrokes are triangulated with the product
data, we shall in the next section present a UAD query language which en-
ables us to retrieve AUs from the product data and to assign it to the relevant
process data.
4 A query language
The previous sections show that UAD is represented as a 4-tuple

{S,T,A,K} for Source and Target texts, Alignment, and Keyboard data
respectively. We have implemented a query language to address nodes in
the UAD with sets of attribute.operator.value. For instance, the
234 Michael Carl
expression [str.=.Although] matches all nodes in the UAD which con-

tain str="Although". The query language has a number of operators. It
allows us to assign variables with the special operator V. Sequences of nodes
are described by successive square brackets, separated by a comma. The pat-
tern below thus matches two successive nodes and assigns the values of the
time attribute to the two variables $T1 and $T2.
[time.V.$T1],[time.V.$T2]
The query language addresses a dimension of the UAD via the elements
in {S,T,A,K}. Two symbols ‘>’ and ‘<’ indicate whether a pattern matches
forward (from low to high) or backwards. Thus, the pattern in the first line of
rule in Table 3 matches every two successive nodes in the keyboard data (K),
starting from lower to higher time values and assigns the time stamps of the
two nodes to the two variables $T1 and $T2. The marker key memorises the
first node. The construction ‘!:’ in the second line interprets and executes
the line as a Perl code. In this case it prints out the content of marked node
key if the time between the two successive keystrokes represented by $T1
and $T2 is less than 500ms.
1 K>key[time.V.$T1],[time.V.$T2]
2 !:if($T2-$T1<500) {PrintPattern(’key’);}
Table 3. The rule prints out keystroke patterns with less than 500ms between successive
keystrokes.
A rule may consists of several successive patterns. In this way several dimen-
sions of the UAD can be correlated and triangulated. Basically, each pattern
matches successively every node in the data dimension and instantiates the
variables with the retrieved values. If a pattern successfully matches a se-
quence of nodes, the rule switches to the next line until either a pattern fails
or the end of the data was reached. The rule then backtracks and searches for
the next pattern in the previous line.
Thus, the rule in Table 4 retrieves all keystrokes that are related to the
production of the translation for “developing”. The pattern in line 1 itera-
tively matches all instances of “developing” in the ST and instantiates the
variable $A1 with the cursor positions. The pattern in line 2 retrieves the
cursor position of the translation via the alignment data (A) and the pattern in
line 3 retrieves the word form (e.g. “udviklingslandene”) of the translation
from the TT (T) and stores it in the variable $V1. The variables $A1 and $A2
1 S>[str.eq.developing,cur.V.$A1]
2 A>[src.eq.$A1,tgt.V.$A2]
3 T>[cur.eq.$A2,str.V.$V1]
4 !:InitKeyRange(’Key’, $A2-1, $A2+length($V1));
5 K<kp[cur.val.Key]
6 !:PrintPattern(’kp:time,type,cur,str’);
Table 4: The rule prints all keyboard activities related to the translation of “developing”.
thus contain the ST and TT cursor positions of an AU, while the variable $V1
contains the TT part of the AU.5
The keystroke pattern (K) in line 5 looks backwards into the keyboard
data and marks all keystroke nodes with the marker kp which are part of the
AU sought. A special operator val is used to keep track of the beginning
and end cursor positions in the TT segment. The beginning and end cursor
positions of the TT segment are initialised with a function:
InitKeyRange(’Key’,$A2-1, $A2+length($V1))
InitKeyRange initialises the values c1 and c2 , as described in

Section 5, with the beginning position $A2-1 and the end position
$A2+length($V1) of the translation for “developing”. The beginning
position is set to $A2-1 to include also the preceding blank space. When
going backwards in time through the keyboard data, for each keystroke that
modifies the length or position of the translation traced, the values c1,2 have
to be adjusted. The operator val performs this operation as discussed in
Section 5.
Finally, the function:
PrintPattern(’kp:time,type,cur,str’);
in line 6 prints out the marked keyboard nodes. In this way, the rule retrieves
all keyboard activities which belong to the production of the translation for
“developing”.
5 Tracing text production
When tracing the production of a TT segment Ci in the process data, we

want to retrieve all keystrokes which contribute to the creation of Ci . With
5
An AU may consist of several tuples $A1/$A2, since it may contain more than one word-to-word trans-
lation.
236 Michael Carl
an exhaustive fragmentation of the TT into n non-overlapping text segments

C1...n every keystroke should be part of at least one Ci.
Assuming we know that text segment C 6 occurs between cursor posi-
tions c1 and c2 in the final translation, then the length of C equals c2 − c1 . To
know what keystrokes contributed to C, we have to look backwards into the
logging data and retrieve the appropriate data entries which indicate keyboard
activities at position ci between c1 and c2 .
Each time an insertion at position ci is observed, with c1 ≤ ci < c2 , the
length of the remaining part of C, which is to be traced, decreases. We thus
need to subtract the length of the inserted string at ci from c2 , so that if c1
equals c2 we have found all keystrokes for C and we can stop further search
in the keyboard data. In order for this to work, a number of conditions must
be met:
• An insertion of length l before cursor position c1 moves C to the right

so that its position was c1 := c1 − l and c2 := c2 − l
• A deletion of length l before cursor position c1 moves C to the left so

that its position was c1 := c1 + l and c2 := c2 + l
• An insertion of l characters after cursor position c1 and before cursor

position c2 (i.e. a part of C was produced) shortens C so that c2 := c2 −l
• A deletion of l characters after cursor position c1 and before cursor po-

sition c2 (i.e. a part of C was deleted) lengthens C so that c2 := c2 + l
Note that keyboard activities to the right of C, i.e. ci > c2 can be

disregarded.
More case distinctions are necessary if we consider that the length l of
the inserted/deleted sequence is longer than 1 and overlaps with the beginning
or the end of C, so that ci < c1 and ci + l > c1 or ci < c2 and ci + l >
c2 . Updating values for c1 and c2 should then only take into account the
overlapping inserted/deleted piece, and not the entire length l.
As previously explained in Figure 7, Translog also allows usage of the
clipboard to copy & paste sequences of texts. This makes the history of text
production arbitrarily complex, since the pasted sequence can, in principle, be
recursively composed by pasting together smaller pieces which can be taken
from anywhere in the already produced text, or even from outside Translog.
6
We omit from now on the index i .
For instance, during translation revision, parts of a sentence may be moved

and recomposed, word order reversed, and pieces of the text may be partially
rewritten etc.
As of now, we have only implemented a tracing operation to follow up
text production of the paste operation if the entire sequence C is contained in
the pasted segment. That is, for a pasted segment P we assume that c1 ≥ p1
and c2 ≤ p2 , where p1 and p2 are the start and end cursor positions of P .
Shorter segments C are unlikely to be produced by compositionally
pasting their components: one would not usually copy the stem of a word
from one part of the text and its inflection ending from another part. How-
ever, if C becomes longer, it is certainly possible that C is composed of
several pasted sequences. Thus, parts of sentences could be moved or clauses
could be restructured by re-using already written material. However, we have
not observed such operations in our material so far.7
6 Triangulating AUs with keystroke data
AUs are the smallest units which connect the ST and the TT, and keyboard
logging data reveals how AUs emerge in time. In Section 5 we have discussed
how process data can be assigned to TT segments C. In this section we look
at triangulation of AUs with keyboard data. Table 1 in Section 2 shows that
almost the entire ST and TT are fragmented into AUs for the four transla-
tions, except for a small number of words which remain unaligned. Since we
assume that every keyboard activity is driven by the goal to produce a trans-
lation of the ST, we can now break the set of keystrokes down into smaller
parts and investigate the new properties of AUs independently.
Figures 8 and 9 show how AUs emerge in time. The graphs reveal where
there are pauses and deletions, and how keystrokes and gaze activities are dis-
tributed over time. It gives a general picture of how the translation develops
by relating each activity to the ST unit which it translates. We consider the
following keystrokes to be part of an AU:
1. all insertion keystrokes that occur between c1 and c2

2. all deletion keystrokes that occur between c1 and c2
3. the keystroke immediately preceding c1
7
One is more likely to find such patterns in a text production task, as, for instance, writing this text, than in
the kind of translation task we are investigating here.
238 Michael Carl
Figure 8. The graphs represent translation progression patterns of 2 subjects, A2 (left) and M
(right). On the Y-axis the words of the ST are enumerated (1 to 100). The Y-axis gives pro-
duction time of the translation in ms. The dots indicate different kinds of keyboard activities
(insertions and deletions). The line represents gaze behaviour on the ST words. Fixations on
the TT window are indicated with a triangle symbol on line 100. Notice that M needs more
than twice as much time as A2, half of it due to revision. The dots on the 0-line indicate
keyboard actions which could not be attributed to any AU.
Figure 9. The graphs represent translation progression for K (left) and S (right). Both
needed approximately the same time to translate the text. There are long stretches of time in
S’s translation progression graph where no keyboard and gaze activities are recorded. It is
unclear what happened during this period of time.
240 Michael Carl
A) [udvi] ud[ivk]vi[lk][l]klingslandene
9 _udviklingslandene 6 _udvi 3 _udivk

B) 8 _udvi 5 _udvilk 2
7 _udvil 4 _ud 1 udvi
Table 5. The example plots correction patterns and writing progression of AU2 .
A) shows the S-notation and B) illustrates 9 correction steps in the development of
“udviklingslandene”.
This definition does not distinguish between types of keyboard actions such
as correcting typos, changing inflection or substituting lexemes or even
changes as a consequence of reconsidering the syntactic structure of the trans-
lation. While such a classification is beyond the scope of this paper, this def-
inition has the advantage that (almost) all keystrokes can be associated with
particular AUs.
The example in Table 5 shows the keystrokes involved in the production
of the AU2 : “developing countries ↔ udviklingslandene”.
The example represents words 2 and 3 of the ST (see Appendix) and the
product data is represented in Figures 2, 3 and 4. Table 5 shows a number of
(immediate) corrections and their representation in S-notation as outlined in
Figure 5: characters in square brackets represent deletions and the underscore
“_” represents a blank space. Indexes represent temporal order of corrections
and identical indexes indicate closeness in time.
Table 5 shows the development of “udviklingslandene”, looking
backwards into the keyboard data. It consists of 9 steps, of which the last
corresponds to the final form as observed in the final translation. In steps 5 to
8 the characters “kl” are accidentally reversed and corrected. Steps 3 and 4
show a similar procedure with correction of reversed letters “vi”. At step 2,
the entire sequence “udvi” is deleted, in order to insert a blank space before
the word which had been omitted in step 1.
We incorporate steps 2 and 1 into AU2 , since we consider the keystroke
immediately preceding the TT sequence to be part of the AU. Otherwise
these keystrokes could not be assigned to any AU. For the same reason
all the keystrokes in Figure 5 are part of the same AU, and the keystrokes
“_m[_der]å” in Figure 6 are part of another AU.
A more complex keyboard pattern can be observed during the produc-
tion of AU “go ↔ at iværksætte” for word number 38 of the ST in
the Appendix. The example is taken from translator M (Figure 8) where 36
Figure 10. These graphs represent properties of the AUs and their associated keyboard ac-
tivities for the four subjects {A2, K, M, S}. The horizontal X-axis lists the words in the
ST. The vertical Y-axis in the top graph shows the number of keystrokes/length of the AU
translation. A value of 1 means that the length of the AU translation equals the number of
keystrokes (i.e. no corrections take place during the production of that AU). A value > 1 in-
dicates deletions. For instance, at word number 21 (translation of “on”), translator M needs
17 times more keystrokes than the length of the translation.
The bottom figure plots the length of the translation for each ST word. It shows, for
instance, that the translation of word 21 (in the M data) is one character long. It also shows
that translations of most words have similar length, across the four translations. Note that
some of the divergences might be due to inconsistencies in alignment strategies, e.g. words
7 to 11 and 95 to 99.
AUs can be recognised through the same length and/or number of keystrokes. For
instance, ST words 14 to 16 are part of the same AU. In each translation they have the same
length (bottom) and the same number of keystrokes (top), which indicates that these words
are clustered into one AU.
242 Michael Carl
keystrokes are counted (including deletions) to produce the translation of 13

characters:
[ta |1 ]1 at [gøre |2 ]2 iværksæ[kk]3|4 {tt}4 e|3
As introduced in Figure 5 Kollberg (1998) uses the symbol “|i ” to in-
dicate an interruption at time i. A distinction is made between i) insertion
interruptions, in which case the interruption symbol is placed immediately
to the right of the last insterted character, as in “|1,2,3” above and ii) revi-
sion interruptions, in which case the symbol is immediately to the right of
the closing revision bracket, as shown in “|4 ” in the example above. Each
interruption refers to a co-indexed insertion or deletion action.
The pattern starts with the correction of “ta” into “at” followed by the
typing and deletion of “gøre”, presumably due to a reconsideration of the
syntactic structure. Then “iværksække” is produced and finally “kk” is
corrected into “tt”. These activities take place at different points during the
translation: while the first two corrections take place while typing the words,
the substitution “[kk]3|4{tt}4” is represented in two successive actions, a
deletion of “kk” at revision time |3 which is immediadely followed by the
insertion of “tt” at time |4.
Figures 8 and 9 better reveal the temporal distribution of keyboard ac-
tions. Particularly M (Figure 8) has a very long post-editing phase, which
shows that some AUs emerge in different sequences of time.
Some of the keyboard activities cannot be attributed to any AU. There
are two reasons for this: i) a word in the TT has not been aligned to any ST
word. This is mainly the case for punctuation marks, but also sometimes for
determiners or (relative) pronouns like Danish “den”, “der” which cannot (or
are not) connected to any ST word(s). Subsequently those keyboard activities
do not belong to any AU. Another reason is ii) the presence of sequences of
insertions and deletions immediately before such unaligned items. Table 6
summarises these keystrokes for the four participants.
A2 K M S
unclassified 32 57 24 33
unaligned 3 4 21 2
Table 6: The number of unaligned and unclassified keystrokes in the UAD.
For instance, the following keystrokes are part of such unclassified activities.
The segment was first inserted at the end of the text, then modified several
times (as can be seen through the square brackets) and finally replaced by
“følges ad”. It is the last AU from the data of M in Figure 8:
[bliver derfor nødt til[at ] a gå hånd i hån]
Figure 11. These graphs show the time delay between successive keyboard activities of the
four subjects. The X-axis plots the words in the ST. The Y-axis in the top Figure shows aver-
age intra-word keystroke time span between two successive keystrokes within the production
of one AU. The bottom Figure shows inter-word keystroke time delay between the end of
an AU and the start of typing of the next AUs. Notice that the time scale is one magnitude
higher for inter-AU pauses than for intra-AU pauses.
The graphs in Figures 10 and 11 resume the quantification of AUs. Figure 10

puts into relation the length of the AU and the number of keystrokes, while
Figure 11 puts into relation the time between successive keystrokes between
and within words.
It is interesting to notice that there seems to be a difficult part in the
translation of words 19 to 30, words 71 to 85 and 90 to 99. This is partic-
ularly visible in the keystoke/length ratio in the top graph of Figure 10,
where many AUs are produced by all translators using more than 5 times the
244 Michael Carl
keystrokes of the length of the final translation. It is obvious that there are
parts which are easy for all translators, i.e. where the keystoke/length ratio
is 1 for everyone, and that there are parts which are ‘difficult’ for everyone.
A similar, although not so clear picture emerges in the inter- and intra-word
keystroke time span in Figure 11. Also here, much time is spent during the
translation of words 19 to 30, 71 to 85 and 91 to 99, particularly on inter-word
time spans as shown in the lower graph, but other factors seem to interfere.
For instance, much time is also spent around the translations of word 45, for
both inter- and intra-word keystrokes, but this obviously did not have a high
impact on correction patterns (Figure 11). We hope to investigate this further
and to relate these quantitative findings to the linguistic properties of the AU.
7 Discussion
Krings (2005) suggests an “ascending abstraction” of categories in which

translation process research should be carried out. The basis of research is
an analysis of the phenomena which is “so to speak the degree zero of data
analysis”(my transl.). This basic investigation should be followed by a clas-
sification, quantification and correlation of the phenomena, and subsequently
by the detection of causal relations, which finally leads to the elaboration of
a theory. According to him (as of 2005) most translation process research
either gets stuck in listing phenomena or in classifying them, and sometimes
reaches the level of quantification. Given the novelty of the area of research,
this is, according to Krings, not surprising.
With this work, we seek to push research further into the investigation
of correlations, the systematical investigation into the statistical dependence
between two (or more) variables. To do so, we need a consistent data structure
in which the data is represented. We also need a reasonable amount of data
on which statistics can be based. Further, we need a sufficiently expressive
formalism with which we can formulate the variables that we are interested
in and an automated method to query the data so as to retrieve all instances
of patterns which satisfy the description of these variables. Only then can
we quantify dependencies in the data and eventually detect degrees of causal
relations.
This paper has outlined a strategy and a set of tools ready to use for
cross-validation and triangulation of Translog product and process data. Be-
sides the key-logging data, Translog also provides two texts, the ST and the
TT. The notion of Alignment Unit (AU) allows us to fragment the product
data into smaller segments which can be quantified and triangulated with
process data. While a general theory of human translation founded on trans-
lation process data may perhaps not be reached in the near future, we show
a way of correlating and modelling the data in a quantitative manner. At this
point we are still far from being able to formulate conditional probabilities
over Process Data (PD) and AUs (and maybe also Translation Units) which
would answer questions such as: given a history of PD what is the probability
of the next AUi to be deleted, inserted or modified? The extent to which we
can answer this and related questions will ultimately determine the success
of integrating advanced translation aids with human translation activities.
Flick (2008, 20) points out that triangulation is to be understood as a
“strategy on the way to a deeper understanding of the investigated object and
thus a step towards more knowledge and to a lesser extent to validity and ob-
jectivity of the interpretation” (my trans.). And so we hope that triangulating
product and process data may contribute to a deeper understanding of human
translation processes.
246 Triangulating product and process data
References
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the design and development of a web application for storing, annotating, and
querying translation process data. Across Languages and Cultures 10(2): 251-
273.
Carl, M., and Jakobsen A. L. Forthcoming. Towards statistical modelling of
translators’ activity data. International Journal of Speech Technology.
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Dragsted, B. 2004. Segmentation in Translation and Translation Memory Systems.
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(ed.) Probing the Process in Translation: Methods and Results (Copenhagen
Studies in Language 24). Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur. 9–20.
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Sullivan, and E. Lindgren (eds). 2006. Computer Keystroke Logging and
Writing: Methods and Applications. Oxford/Amsterdam: Elsevier. 95-105.
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Representing Text Composition. Licenciate thesis, Royal Institute of Techno-
logy, Stockholm.
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Übersetzungsprozessforschung im Überblick. Meta 50(2): 342–358.
Kromann, M.T. 2003. The Danish dependency treebank and the DTAG treebank
tool. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic
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Appendix
The ST consists of the following 100 words. For technical reasons punctua-
tion marks were deleted from the text but are shown here in brackets (·) to
facilitate reading:
1 Although 26 threaten 51 minimise 76 of

2 developing 27 economic 52 emissions 77 it (.)
3 countries 28 development (.) 53 from 78 Developing
4 are 29 Incentives 54 deforestation (.) 79 countries (,)
5 understandably 30 must 55 Some 80 in
6 reluctant 31 be 56 of 81 particular (,)
7 to 32 offered 57 the 82 need
8 compromise 33 to 58 most 83 to
9 their 34 encourage 59 vulnerable 84 adapt
10 chances 35 developing 60 countries 85 to
11 of 36 countries 61 of 86 the
12 achieving 37 to 62 the 87 effects
13 better 38 go 63 world 88 of
14 standards 39 the 64 have 89 climate
15 of 40 extra 65 contributed 90 change (.)
16 living 41 green 66 the 91 Adaptation
17 for 42 mile 67 least 92 and
18 the 43 and 68 to 93 mitigation
19 poor (,) 44 implement 69 climate 94 efforts
20 action 45 clean 70 change (,) 95 must
21 on 46 technologies (,) 71 but 96 therefore
22 climate 47 and 72 are 97 go
23 change 48 could 73 bearing 98 hand
24 need 49 also 74 the 99 in
25 not 50 help 75 brunt 100 hand (.)
Part III
EYE-TRACKING
STUDIES
Eye tracking in translation process research:
methodological challenges and solutions
Sharon O’Brien
Abstract
Eye tracking has been eagerly adopted as a technique in translation

process research in recent years and, with it, comes a long list of
methodological challenges, some of which are specific to translation
process research, some of which are more general. This paper represents
an attempt by a recent convert to eye tracking to document the various
challenges and to offer suggestions for how some of them might be
addressed by others who are interested in embracing this very interesting
mode of investigation. It is difficult to comment only on those challenges
related to eye tracking without mentioning issues that pertain to the more
general questions of research design in the domain of translation process
research as the two are inevitably linked. By highlighting challenges, one is
inevitably exposing research design weaknesses. However, this should not
be viewed negatively but should rather be seen as a means of improving the
quality of combined research outputs with the aim of maturing the domain.
This paper is broadly divided into two parts: the first discusses the
methodological challenges, which in turn are divided into the categories of
research environment, research participants, ethics, data explosion and
validity. Each section is then repeated in the second part of the paper,
which offers suggestions on how the challenges might be addressed.
1. Methodological challenges
1.1 Research environment
“Research environment” refers to where the research takes place, the

conditions in which it takes place and the equipment used. The challenges
252 Sharon O’Brien
presented by using an eye tracker in translation process research are

discussed here under the headings of equipment, accommodation and
familiarity.
Equipment
At the time of writing, the Tobii brand of eye tracker (1750, T60 or T120
models) was the most popular model in Translation Studies. This eye
tracker is a desktop eye tracker with an in-built camera and infrared diodes.
Its advantage is that it resembles a normal computer monitor and is
therefore quite “uninvasive” for research participants, who are physically
unaware that their eyes are being tracked (the participants would of course
be made aware in advance that their eye movements were being tracked,
see “Ethics” below). This type of eye tracker increases the ecological
validity for the type of research projects conducted in Translation Studies
and it is generally deemed to be more advantageous than the head-mounted
eye tracker1 because it does not burden the participant with physical
equipment on the body. However, there is a trade-off between accuracy and
validity here since head-mounted eye trackers are generally considered to
be more accurate than desktop ones.2
Some of the challenges associated with using an eye tracker include
(i) cost, (ii) rapid technological redundancy and (iii) learning curve. To date
some translation research centres have managed to acquire funding to
purchase an eye tracker. However, this technology is relatively expensive
and funding is difficult to attain. The analysis software, which is used to
analyse the data generated during eye-tracking sessions, may be frequently
updated or, indeed, completely redesigned and there is sometimes a lack of
backwards compatibility, meaning that eye-tracking sessions recorded in
new versions cannot be viewed or analysed in older versions and vice
1
Examples of current head-mounted eye trackers are the Arrington Research Mounted
Eye Tracking System (http://www.arringtonresearch.com/headmountframe.html) or
the ASL EYETRAC®6 head mounted optics (http://www.a-s-
l.com/site/Products/EYETRAC6Series/HeadMounted/tabid/57/Default.aspx) [Last
Accessed 12/05/09].
2
For example, the Tobii 120 model can collect data at a rate of 120 Hz whereas the
ASL head-mount model can collect data at 120, 240 and 360 Hz, according to the
technical specifications on each company’s website.
Eye tracking in translation process research 253
versa. A steep learning curve can also be associated with the use of the
analysis software.
Accommodation
Once an eye tracker has been acquired, it needs to be housed somewhere.
Eye trackers do not require vast amounts of space: a normal desk will
suffice. The challenge is to find a space which meets specific requirements
for conducting eye-tracking research. In particular, consideration must be
given to light, sound and familiarity of the surroundings. If, as is the case
for many translation process researchers, one is interested in measuring
cognitive effort, then recording pupil dilations will be of particular interest.
However, pupil dilation is known to be influenced by many factors, such as
changes in light intensity, sound, caffeine, drugs, substance abuse, eye
colour and even heavy eye make-up. It is highly recommended, therefore,
that the lighting in the room where the eye tracking research takes place is
controlled. At a minimum, blackout blinds and a consistent source of
lighting are recommended. It has also been shown that the pupil reacts to
sound so it is logical to control for this. Since soundproofing a room is
beyond the means of most translation research groups, one should attempt
to house the eye tracker in a quiet location and/or to conduct sessions when
noise interruptions are least likely. Other factors, such as caffeine levels,
substance abuse, eye make-up etc. are more difficult to control but
participants can be made aware that these factors can influence
measurements and can be asked to avoid caffeine prior to sessions or not to
self-select if they have a record of substance abuse, for example.
Familiarity
Translation process studies, including those using eye-tracking equipment,
frequently use professional translators as “research participants” in a bid to
uncover professional work practices, strategies and differences between
professionals and novices, among other things. This raises a challenge for
ecological validity: we wish to observe what professional translators
“normally” do, but we remove them from their “normal” work
environments in order to do so. The fact that the eye-tracking monitor is
most likely different in shape and size from their usual monitor, or that the
operating system, software, version numbers, language packs, screen layout
or even keyboard type differ from their usual work environment may have
an impact on their performance. The research community should not
abandon research because of these challenges, but, where a “normal work
environment” is an important factor, the eye-tracking environment ought to
be set up in such a way that the participant is familiar and comfortable with
it.
1.2 Research participants
Translation process research needs translators in order to observe, record

and theorise the translation process. As mentioned, some researchers are
interested in professional translators while others are interested in students
of translation or in the differences between professionals and students. This
focus on professionals presents many challenges, in general, as well as
some specific challenges for eye tracking. We will discuss the general
challenges first followed by the challenges relating to eye tracking.
Terminological considerations
Different terms are used in translation process research to designate people
who earn their living by translating and people who are learning to do so.
The first category is typically termed “professional”, a wide variety of
names has been attributed to the second category, e.g. semi-professional,
novice, student. Although the term “professional” is used consistently to
refer to somebody who is a practising translator and not a student, the
scope of the term varies. A professional could be a person who has more
than 10 years of experience working full-time as a freelance translator or it
could mean a graduate who has worked for less than one year in a
translation agency. Therefore, when we make claims about how
“professionals” operate, we are making claims about people with very
different levels of experience. It should be acknowledged that even if the
behaviour of two professional translators each with 10 years of experience
was compared, it would not be surprising to see evidence of quite different
behaviour. We are, after all, observing humans. Therefore, the research
domain would benefit from agreeing criteria for the term “professional” so
that we can make valid cross-study comparisons.
As mentioned, the term used for people who are studying to become
translators also varies. The validity of the term “semi-professional” to
denote a final-year translation student is debatable. The same is true of the

term “novice”. Until the research community can agree appropriate terms
and criteria for assigning those terms, we ought to simply describe the
profiles of our participants in detail. So, for example, if participants are
post-graduate MA students in Translation Studies who are in the second
and final semester of their training programme, then these are the exact
details we should provide when describing our research participants.
Numbers
Since translation process research relies on human participants, one of the
challenges is including an adequate number of participants who fit the
specific profile we are hoping to investigate in order to enable researchers
to make generalisable claims. If we wish to include professional translators
in a study, then funding is required to pay such participants. Some
professional translators will give freely and generously of their time.
However, this raises questions about ecological validity: if somebody is
donating their time freely in the name of research, one cannot be certain
that they will behave “normally”, i.e. as one does in everyday translation
work. Admittedly, it is also difficult to prove “normal behaviour” even
when a person is being paid for their participation. However, it is
reasonable to expect that they would behave normally if they are being
paid. A certain aspect of the “normality” is of course compromised because
the translator knows that the researcher is not a “real” client and that they
have little to lose if they do not perform well. This is a methodological
concern which has no easy solution.
Given limited funding, it is difficult to recruit adequate numbers of
participants to make generalisable claims. Some studies have included five
subjects, others ten, others 20. For example, in the research reported in a
recent volume of the Copenhagen Studies in Language (Göpferich et al.
2008), the average number of participants in eye-tracking studies of
translation was 12. Making valid generalisations on the basis of such
numbers is questionable. Nonetheless, these studies have significant value.
First, they are pioneering in their use of eye tracking in translation studies.
Researchers are testing equipment, research designs, and methodologies.
Secondly, such studies are valuable for generating hypotheses using small
communities which can then be tested on larger communities.
Recruiting student translators is somewhat easier than professionals;

students tend to be keen on learning about the research, methods and
technology. Some reward for participating can be offered in the form of
course credits (though this is not possible in all educational institutions) or
in the form of books or book tokens, for example. However, the ethical
considerations of offering rewards for participating in research studies also
need to be considered (see “Ethics” for more discussion on this). Although
student translators are easier to recruit than professionals, as a research
community we should nonetheless be wary of applying the “professional”
label to final-year translation students. We also need to acknowledge that,
while we aspire to graduating translators who are ready to work in the
professional translation domain, they are still at the bottom of the
professional ladder when they graduate and have much to learn in the
workplace.
Competence
Let us assume for one moment that research funding is abundant and we
can afford to recruit, say, 50 professional translators and 50 student
translators for a comparative study of translation strategies, cognitive load
or translation competence. Let us also assume that we have agreed rigid
definitions for our categories of “professional” (e.g. must have worked full-
time as a translator in a specific specialised field for a minimum of 10
years) and “student” (must be in their second semester, at post-graduate
level, with an average score in economic translation of 65 % and no fails in
any subject). Can we assume that the 50 professional translators have equal
competence or that the 50 students have equal competence? Our experience
as translator trainers allows us to reasonably expect diverse levels of
competence in different aspects of translation (e.g. SL comprehension, TL
production, specialised domain knowledge, etc.) within each of these
groups. The first challenge for translation process researchers is to
acknowledge this diversity. We cannot claim that our participants are all
equal. At the same time, having diversity within one group does not
invalidate our studies. By having greater numbers, we can both expose and
explore the diverse behaviour and competences and look for commonalities
among the members of specific groups. The commonalities then allow us to
make general claims about the nature of the translation process.
When it comes to using eye trackers, this diversity is all the more
apparent. Even if we can build a group of research participants using tight
control criteria, we are still faced with individual differences that have an
impact on the study. Participants may have individual eye conditions,
which reduce the quality of the data collected by the eye tracker. For
example, it is claimed by the manufacturers of eye-tracking equipment that
spectacles and contact lenses do not hinder eye tracking. In reality, the
quality of eye data can be better for one person when wearing spectacles
and for another when wearing contact lenses. Dark-coloured eyes may also
have an impact on the ability of the eye tracker to differentiate the pupil
from the iris. On some occasions, the quality of eye-gaze data might be so
low that participants’ data cannot be used in a study.
When is a suitable participant not suitable?

Even though a researcher may implement strict screening for the
recruitment of individuals into a research study, it is sometimes the case
that other issues arise which result in having to remove that person from the
study. Such issues may include skills such as touch typing, language
competence, ability to follow instructions, and propensity towards a “white
coat effect”. Each of these will be discussed briefly.
An important quality when participating in eye-tracking studies is the
ability to look at the screen. For text production studies, for example, the
requirement is to look at the screen and not at the keyboard, so touch-
typing is an essential skill. However, few people learn to touch type in the
true sense of the term these days and, even if participants self-select on the
basis that they can touch type, the researcher may well find that they spend
a significant proportion of time looking at the keyboard. If this amount of
time is significantly high, this participant’s data cannot be used in the
study.3
3
What qualifies as “significantly high” is not yet agreed among translation-process
researchers. The threshold set for data quality will depend on many factors, such as
the general objective of the study, how many participants one has, other measurement
criteria being used, etc. As a very general and somewhat simplistic guideline, if less
than 70 % of the time is spent looking at the screen, the researcher might want to
consider removing that participant from the study. However, this could be seen as a
lowest limit threshold.
Language competence is one of the basic criteria for selecting

participants. Being a “native speaker” of the target language, for example,
might be important in a research design. Participants may self-select for a
study on the basis that they are native speakers of a particular language, but
it can then transpire that they are bilingual, with one language more
dominant than the other which may have an impact on their translation
processes and product. It is therefore important to check with participants
that they really meet the criteria specified for language competence.
Studies by Jääskeläinen (1987) and Tirkkonen-Condit (1989)
demonstrated that the translation assignment, i.e. instructions to the
subjects on what the translation was for, strongly influences the process.
Therefore, it is important to consider the phrasing of such instructions. A
frequent requirement in translation process research is that the participants
behave as they would normally if a client had commissioned the
translation. This requires the participants to suspend belief and pretend that
the research assignment is “real”. A second challenge has to do with the
ability (or the inclination) to obey instructions about the experiment itself.
In particular when using an eye tracker, participants may be instructed to sit
at a certain distance from the screen, not to move their heads too much, to
press specific keys at certain points in the process, not to use hardback
dictionaries, or not to interrupt their flow or talk to the researcher until they
are finished. While these instructions are all relatively simple, some
participants are better at following them than others.
Given that translation process experiments can be somewhat artificial
in nature, it is important to put participants at their ease and to make sure
they do not feel intimidated, judged, or in any way threatened. Ways of
addressing these concerns include anonymising the data and informing
participants that the study centres on how translation is done and not
necessarily on how good the end product is (although product quality can
be a feature of some studies). By conducting a pre-eye tracking briefing or
interview and a warm-up session, participants can also be made to feel at
ease. However, it is still the case that some participants are highly sensitive
to being studied and a “white coat effect” ensues where they find
themselves behaving differently to how they would normally behave.
Sometimes participants will voluntarily inform the researcher of this after
the session. However, the effect is sometimes undiscovered until some of
that participant’s data has been analysed and it becomes clear that
something went wrong during the session. Ironically, in this author’s
experience, this happens less with students and more with professionals.
1.3 Ethics
It is more and more the case that researchers wishing to recruit human
participants for research purposes, even in Translation Studies, are required
to obtain ethical approval from their organisation’s ethics committee. While
this might initially seem unnecessary, it is a very important step in research
preparation. The ethics approval procedure requires the researcher to state
in a comprehensible way the purpose of the research and precisely what is
required from participants. A researcher could be tempted not to inform
participants that their eyes are being tracked, in order to stave off the
“white coat effect” mentioned above, but this would be considered
unethical by many.
The ethics approval documentation also sets out participants’ rights,
i.e. (usually) that they will not be named, that their data will be protected
and stored securely and that they can withdraw from the study at any stage
without penalty. The latter right is of special importance for the two groups
of participants that are commonly used in translation process research. In
the case of student translators, especially when the researcher is also a
teacher of the participant, it is important for the participant to know that
removing themselves from the study will have no impact on other student
activities.
Professional translators may also wish to remove themselves from a
study for a number of reasons. If the professional’s relationship to the
researcher is one-to-one, this is not such a problem (except for the
researcher who has lost a precious participant). However, this raises an
interesting dilemma if the professional translator is a sub-contractor to an
industrial sponsor of the research and the industrial sponsor is paying for
the professional’s time. Under normal working conditions, there might be a
penalty if translators removed themselves from a commercial project prior
to its completion. On the other hand, when that “project” is research being
paid for commercially and the researcher is obliged to say that the
participant can withdraw at any stage without penalty, then there is clearly
a contradiction in terms. There is no easy solution, but it is advisable to

acknowledge and discuss these eventualities upfront in such circumstances.
A general ethical question should be addressed here also: translation
process research effectively seeks to understand how translators work, what
practices are “successful”, what counts as “efficient”. These represent the
concerns of those who pay for translation services too. If our research
exposes individuals as being incompetent, unprofessional, inefficient, etc.,
then we are arguably putting individual careers at risk. This is especially
the case when the research is part-funded by industrial partners. It is
therefore of the utmost importance to discuss these eventualities with all
stakeholders prior to the commencement of a study and to ensure that there
is no negative impact on individual livelihoods through our research
activities.
1.4 Data explosion
We mentioned earlier that an important design challenge in translation

process research is the small number of subjects and the resulting inability
to generalise research findings. Funding for participants and ability to
recruit participants of similar competence were mentioned as two
impediments to working with larger numbers. The nature and extent of the
data generated, especially when using eye tracking and keyboard logging,
represents another challenge.
Translation process researchers have increasingly subscribed to
recommendations on research methodologies expounded by, e.g., Frey et
al. (1991: 124):
Measurement validity and reliability can be increased by combining quantitative
and qualitative measuring procedures in the same research study, a practice
referred to as triangulation.
Triangulation has been recommended and, indeed, adopted by many in the

field (e.g. Krings 2001, Alves 2003, O’Brien 2005, etc.). Triangulation
involves a weaving of results obtained using different tools and methods –
some quantitative, some qualitative – such as interviews, questionnaires,
think-aloud protocols, quality assessment, keyboard logging and eye
tracking. Each one of these techniques produces a large data set which has
to be recorded, transcribed, coded and analysed. Eye tracking alone
produces a veritable sea of data: there are gaze plots showing the number
and sequence of fixations, hotspots showing the areas on the screen that
were most frequently fixated, video files showing the eye gaze, reading and
text production data which are sometimes overlaid with concurrent or
retrospective protocols, and each eye-tracking recording also produces a
very large data file with millisecond-based data on the position of the eyes
according to the X, Y coordinates of the screen, the left and right pupil
sizes, the validity of the data at any point in time, the fixation number, etc.
If a keyboard-logging tool such as Translog is used in conjunction with the
eye tracker, then researchers also have at their disposal a Translog replay
file and a log file containing information about all the keyboarding and
pause activity. All of this is produced per person, per recording. On the
positive side, researchers have a rich set of data at their disposal from
which conclusions can be drawn. However, the effect on the lone
researcher, even with a small number of participants, can be overwhelming.
How do we scale this up to include larger numbers of participants? While
eye-tracking analysis programs such as Tobii’s ClearView or Studio
automate some aspects of the data analysis, it does not automate everything
(e.g. pupil dilation calculations are still done “manually”, i.e. the researcher
has to figure out a way of slicing data and creating macros in a program
such as MS Excel). Suggestions on how to manage the data explosion are
given in “Addressing the Challenges”.
1.5 Validity
Many of the above-mentioned challenges impact on the validity of research

design. For translation process studies, one other issue deserves mention:
what participants are translating and how. The capacity of one researcher to
thoroughly analyse the amount of data that translation process methods can
produce is limited. As a result, we tend to choose quite short texts for our
research studies. The reasons for 200–300 word texts are numerous and
valid. For example, participants could get tired or bored quickly, leading to
a drop in motivation and an effect on the data; or, for eye tracking, scrolling
down on a screen is problematic and therefore texts are selected so that the
source and target can fit on the screen at the same time. If the researcher is
interested in word fixations, the font size has to be big (16 or 18 font size,
for example) and this makes it impossible to select long texts. The
challenge for translation process studies lies in the fact that, with the
exception of the localisation industry, translators normally work with larger
chunks of text and, therefore, one could argue that we are not investigating
“real scenarios”. The validity of our research is, therefore, compromised.
Secondly, how participants are translating texts raises concerns about
validity. Translators might spend most of their day working in MS Word,
or MS Excel or in a particular Translation Memory environment. They use
the World-Wide Web for research purposes, but also resort to their
customised glossary and their hardback dictionary. They then volunteer for
a research study and are asked to translate, without using the Web, a
dictionary, or their own glossary, a text type they normally do not work
with in a tool they have never encountered before. It is reasonable to expect
that this will impact on their behaviour and we, yet again, are faced with
the issue of researching non-standard behaviour while assuming it is
standard. Translation process research does not find itself alone in this
dilemma, but it is one that has been largely unacknowledged to date and
which needs some consideration and controls.
A third challenge concerns the nature of the texts under study.
Researchers who also translate or teach translation are not unfamiliar with
the fact that the so-called “general” text can sometimes pose even more
difficulties for the translator than the specialised text. At the same time,
few translators earn their living by translating general texts or texts
published in newspapers and, sometimes, the unexpected challenge of the
apparently easy general text presented in a research study can come as a
surprise to the highly specialised translator. Using unfamiliar text types or
domains to investigate processes is valid if we are testing how participants
cope with new or unfamiliar challenges. However, if we want to investigate
what professionals normally do in their usual working environment, then
we need to select texts that will help us answer that question.
2. Addressing the challenges
In this section we make some proposals for how at least some of the
methodological challenges outlined above can be met.
2.1 Research environment
The setting up of a dedicated eye-tracking lab with control for light and
sound is to be recommended. If a “normal” work environment is important
in the research design, the lab should be made to look and feel like a
standard office and not a lab.
The question of increased accuracy (using head-mounted eye
trackers) over ecological validity (using desktop eye trackers) has received
little consideration in translation process research to date. The tacit
agreement, it seems, is that the desktop eye tracker, if combined with other
measurement techniques such as verbal protocols, interviews, keyboard
logging, etc., is accurate enough for the current aims.
Knowing one’s participants prior to commencement of the study is to
be recommended. If the study is concerned with what translators do in their
professional environment, then having information about what type of PC,
operating system, software, versions and keyboards are commonly used is
worthwhile, and efforts should be made to replicate the usual working
scenario. Obviously, this can only be done to a certain extent, as it is not
reasonable to present each participant with an exact replica of their own
working environment. But knowing in advance, for example, that a
participant has only ever used an “azerty” keyboard and is not used to a
“qwerty” keyboard can save the researcher from losing a participant due to
poor data quality caused by having to search for keys on the keyboard.
2.2 Research participants
It is important to decide on specific definitions and criteria for the

participant community prior to commencement of the study. If the study is
a hypothesis-generating one, then low numbers are acceptable. However, if
the researcher wishes to generalise to the greater translation population
community, then a larger number of participants should be included.
Nevertheless, the ability to analyse the data within the specified project
time frame also needs to be considered here.
It is reasonable to assume that there will be a 30 % drop-out rate
(approximately) due to a lack of suitability (physical, competence, white
coat effect, etc.). If specific skills are important, e.g. touch typing, test in
advance. The warm-up task cannot be used for this purpose, as there is
insufficient time to analyse the data if it truly is a “warm-up” task

administered immediately prior to the main research task. If participants are
expected to produce rich concurrent or retrospective protocol data, then it is
advisable to train them in this skill in advance as it is not reasonable to
expect them to produce a rich protocol if they have not done so before.
2.3 Ethics
Serious consideration should be given to the ethical dimension of the

research and to the potential implications for the participants, the researcher
and the sponsor (if there is one).
2.4 Data explosion
Research “teams” are still an unusual concept in Translation Studies, but

this might be the solution to the data explosion resulting from the
triangulation of methods. Several researchers could analyse data produced
using different methods or, indeed, the same data could be analysed by
different researchers from different angles (as is the case with the
TransComp project currently ongoing at the Karl Franzens Universität in
Graz, Austria4).
Statistical analysis of eye-tracking data is usually desirable. For
example, reporting that two averages are different is not very informative
unless the statistical significance of that difference is calculated.
Unfortunately, training in statistics is not common in Translation Studies
and researchers often find themselves struggling with this requirement. If
feasible, consult with a statistician during the study design and after data
collection. If the research is funded, putting funds aside for consulting (or
even hiring) a statistician is advisable.
2.5 Validity
Some research questions can be adequately investigated at the sentence or

sub-sentential level. However, where the object of enquiry is the text, then
4
http://gams.uni-graz.at/fedora/get/container:tc/bdef:Container/get [Last accessed
15/05/09].
valid examples of “texts” should be used in order to meet validity

requirements.
The appropriateness of the text length should be considered. Since
this is particularly problematic for studies involving eye tracking,
triangulation could be considered as a way of compensating for the
scrolling and time limitations imposed by eye-tracking equipment.
If text type and/or complexity is a factor in the research design,
consideration must again be given to how representative the selected texts
are of particular text types and what level of complexity they represent.
Texts could be selected on the basis of research which profiles the
linguistic make-up of specific text types using large corpora (e.g. Biber et
al.’s work from 1998). Text complexity, on the other hand, should be
examined according to strict and reliable criteria (the reliability of
readability formulae for this task is open to debate and rhetorical structure
theory (Taboada and Mann 2006) has been proposed as an adequate way of
measuring text complexity by Alves et al. (this volume). Also, Jensen
(2009) provides a helpful distinction between text difficulty and complexity
and discusses the relevance of readability indices in measuring text
complexity in translation process research, pointing out that readability
indices only take surface structure into account and ignore semantics.
As with all research design, the priming effects caused by the
sequence of text presentation on participants must also be taken into
account.
3. Summary and conclusions
The aim of this paper was to address methodological challenges faced by

translation process researchers especially when they wish to embrace eye
tracking as one of the measurement methods. We have highlighted
challenges pertaining to the research environment, research participants,
ethics, data and validity and we have attempted to suggest some ways of
tackling these challenges. We hope that this discussion will be of use to
those already engaged in eye-tracking research but, more specifically, that
those who have not yet employed this method but are hoping to do so in the
future will find the discussion useful and will be in a position to better
manage some of the challenges highlighted. While eye tracking does not
reveal all there is to know about how humans translate, it certainly adds a
very rich dimension to the tools and methods we have for investigating this
activity, and the challenges involved in implementing it, while not
insignificant, can be overcome. The more the research community
embraces new methods of investigation, the more mature the research will
become and this will be to the advantage of all who are interested in this
field.
References
Alves, F. (ed). 2003. Triangulating Translation: Perspectives in Process

Oriented Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Biber, D. Conrad, S. and Reppen, R. 1998. Corpus Linguistics: Investigating
Language Structure and Use. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Frey, L. R., Botan, C. and Kreps, G. 1991. Investigating Communication – An
Introduction to Research Methods. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall.
Göperich, S. Jakobsen, A.L. and Mees, I. (eds). 2008. Looking at eyes: Eye-
tracking Studies of Reading and Translation Processing. (Copenhagen
Studies in Language 36) Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.
Jääskeläinen, R. 1987. What Happens in a Translation Process – Think-Aloud
Protocols of Translation, Unpublished pro gradu study, Savonlinna:
University of Joensu, Savonlinna School of Translation Studies.
Jensen, K.T.H. 2009. Indicators of Text Complexity, In Göpferich et al. (eds),
Behind the Mind. (Copenhagen Studies in Language 37) Copenhagen:
Samfundslitteratur, 61–81.
Krings, H. P. 2001. Repairing Texts: Empirical Investigations of Machine
Translation Post-Editing Processes. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University
Press, edited/translated by G.S. Koby.
editing effort and machine translatability. Machine Translation 19 (1): 37–
58.
Tirkkonen-Condit, S. 1989. Professional vs. non-professional translation: a think-
aloud protocol study. In C. Séguinot (ed.). The Translation Process.
Toronto: H.G. Publications, School of Translation, York University. 73–85.
Taboada, M. and Mann, W. 2006. Rhetorical Structure Theory: looking back and
moving ahead. Discourse Studies 8(3): 423–459.
A new window on translators’ cognitive activity:
methodological issues in the combined use of eye tracking,
key logging and retrospective protocols
Fabio Alves, Adriana Pagano and Igor da Silva
Abstract
This paper reports on a study which uses eye tracking in conjunction with
key logging and retrospective protocols to propose a methodology for
integrating data from task execution and post-task protocols. Carried out
under experimental conditions, the study targeted ten professional
translators, performing a direct (English into Portuguese) and an inverse
(Portuguese into English) translation. Both tasks were performed using key
logging and eye tracking. Subsequently, a free protocol (subjects’
verbalization prompted by a replay of their own task) and a guided
protocol (subjects’ verbalization elicited through questions) were conducted
with the aid of an eye tracker synchronized with audio recordings of
subjects’ verbalizations. Structured around three research dimensions, the
study aims at raising methodological questions on, and proposals for,
increasing data reliability and comparability, as well as tapping into
translators’ metacognitive activity as a means to gather insights into the
translation processes of professional translators.
1. Introduction
Drawing on the eye-mind assumption formulated by Just & Carpenter

(1980), the study reported here measures cognitive activity as revealed by
eye fixations. The overall purpose is to build a methodological framework
that combines different types and sources of data to tap into metacognitive
activity during experimental translation tasks. Three major exploratory
dimensions are pursued, which, taken together, aim at ultimately suggesting
a new approach to investigate retrospective protocols in translation process
268 Fabio Alves, Adriana Pagano & Igor da Silva
research, building on the triangulation of key-logging and eye-tracking

data.
The first dimension has to do with testing a reliability criterion for
measuring average fixation length values based on Rayner and Sereno‟s
(1994) claim that average fixations in reading activities usually range from
200 to 250 ms. Since the three tasks performed in the experiment reported
in this article – i.e., direct/inverse translation, free protocol (subjects‟
verbalization prompted by a replay of their own task), and guided protocol
(subjects‟ verbalization elicited through questions) – essentially involve
reading texts or text strings, we felt it would be possible to apply criteria
adopted for reading research to translation research. We decided to attempt
to verify whether analyses were reliable in terms of a minimal average
fixation length of 175 ms (see below) provided by two different fixation
filters, namely those available for the Tobii Studio© and the ClearView©
software packages.
The second dimension investigates directionality-related issues based
on an analysis of the three phases of the translation process, i.e.,
orientation, drafting, and revision (Jakobsen 2002). An analysis was carried
out in terms of (1) absolute and relative translation times and (2) fixation
counts in two areas of interest (AOIs) (i.e., source-text area, and target-text
area) for both the inverse and direct translation tasks; likewise fixation
counts for the same AOIs were established for the free and guided
protocols. The aim was to verify the impact of task direction on time spent
and number of fixations.
The third exploratory dimension is of a more descriptive nature,
being concerned with an attempt to track metacognitive activity through
key-logging and eye-tracking data. For this, we carried out an analysis of
the retrospective protocols for the direct translation task with regard to a
text string in the source text where a particular cohesive relation was
realized by means of the conjunctive adjunct “Finally”. According to
Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 541), “Finally” is an enhancing
conjunction, and, more specifically, a conjunctive adjunct signalling spatio-
temporal conclusion. Appearing in clause-initial position at the end of the
source text, this linguistic element indicates the last item in a list, the
preceding members of which are not explicitly signalled by means of other
linguistic devices. We sought to verify our assumption that translators with
A new window on translators’ cognitive activity 269
higher levels of metacognitive activity would be able not only to recall

dealing with the enumeration ending with “Finally” during their translation
task, but also to identify the sequence of items when requested to explain
the use of “Finally”, an operation which could presumably be tracked
through their gaze activity as they scanned the source and target texts (STs
and TTs) during the guided protocols.
2. Background
The use of verbal protocols in translation process research has a long

tradition dating back to the seminal work by Ericsson & Simon (1984).
Different types of verbal protocols – including concurrent, dialogued,
guided, and retrospective protocols – have been reported in the literature. In
the first decade of translation process research, from the mid-1980s to the
mid-1990s, think-aloud protocols (TAPs) were the most predominant type
of data used. In addition, other types of verbal protocols were employed,
leading to a range of studies with very little in common in methodological
terms. The diversity in the use of verbal protocols in translation process
research led to the objections raised by Fraser (1996) regarding the levels
of methodological comparability of these studies, there being very little
consensus among researchers on the most efficient type of verbal report for
translation process research.
In a study comparing the performance of translators under think-
aloud and retrospection conditions, Jakobsen (2003) showed that
concurrent think-aloud has an impact on translation speed and revision. He
also showed that the think-aloud condition increased the number of
segments in text production significantly. According to Jakobsen (2003:
93), “these results in no way invalidate the think-aloud method” but make
us “review assumptions about the think-aloud procedure” as there appears
to be some sort of cognitive overload. In sum, Jakobsen‟s (2003) results
may imply that studies which focus on translation speed, revision and
segmentation should favour retrospection rather than concurrent
verbalization.
Barbosa & Neiva (2003) have discussed the implications of using
specific types of protocol. The authors investigated the differences between
TAPs and retrospection with a focus on free recall for TAPs and guided
intervention for retrospection. According to Barbosa & Neiva (2003: 143),

“a combination of elicitation procedures is desirable because each
generates a different set of data, and those can be triangulated”. Free recall
would be more likely to reveal “the subject‟s own perspective of what goes
on in his or her mind during the translation process”, while guided recall
“would produce a more reliable picture of what occurs during an
individual‟s translation process”.
A question that remains unanswered in previous research relates to
the impact of free or guided retrospection on the way subjects recall
information. The introduction of eye tracking in translation process
research (O‟Brien 2006, Jakobsen & Jensen 2008) allows us to investigate
cognitive processing both during initial and online orientation processes
and during retrospection while translators gaze across the STs and TTs they
have produced.
This paper builds on Jakobsen (2003) as well as on Barbosa & Neiva
(2003) and assumes that retrospection, carried out first as free recall and,
subsequently, as guided recall, supported by eye-tracking recordings, offers
a promising avenue to tap into translators‟ metacognitive activity and
indirectly allows researchers to assess the way translators describe their
own translation processes.
3. Research design and methods
Ten professional translators with a minimum of five years of work

experience as translators in a wide range of domains were asked to perform
both a direct (English > Portuguese) and an inverse translation (Portuguese
> English) task under experimental conditions. The two source texts used
in the experiment (research article introductions) were selected according
to the following criteria: similar number of words (approximately 300),
same domain (medicine: sickle cell disease) and similar rhetorical
complexity as assessed on the basis of Rhetorical Structure Theory
(Taboada & Mann 2006). The latter was a relevant criterion in order for
text choice not to be an intervening variable when dealing with
directionality. To measure the impact of a possible facilitating effect, task
order was randomly shifted, direct translation into Portuguese being the
first task for five of the subjects (S1, S2, S3, S4, S5) and inverse translation
into English the first for the remaining five subjects (S6, S7, S8, S9, S10).
Task performance was recorded using key logging (Translog 2006©) and
eye tracking (Tobii T60© and Tobii Studio 1.5©), the monitor standing 60
to 70 cms away from the subjects‟ eyes. After each task completion,
subjects were asked first to freely recall their performance as they read the
STs and TTs made available to them in the two horizontal windows on the
computer screen. Eye tracking was again used to record gaze movements
across STs and TTs while subjects carried out this recall, their
verbalizations being synchronized with eye movements. Subsequently, the
same equipment and methodology were used to obtain guided protocols
elicited through questions focusing on five language features related to
logical and cohesive relations, nominal group structure and domain
knowledge.
4. Results
This section is divided into three sub-sections, each presenting one of the
three dimensions pursued as described in the introduction in Section 1,
namely (i) the examination of data reliability based on the criterion of
average fixation length values of at least 175 ms in an attempt to verify
whether similar results are obtained for average fixation length provided by
two different fixation filters; (ii) the examination of the impact of
directionality on the time spent and on the number of fixations in the three
phases of the translation process, as well as on the number of fixations in
two major areas of interest (i.e., source-text area, and target-text area)
during free and guided recall; (iii) the analysis of retrospective protocols
related to a particular cohesive device in the direct translation task in an
attempt to tap into levels of metacognitive activity assumed to be at play
during task execution.
4.1 First dimension: reading and average fixation length
By introducing eye tracking to translation process research, Jakobsen &

Jensen (2008) have shown that different tasks result in different fixation
patterns. Scholars using eye tracking to analyse reading tasks have been
seriously concerned with data reliability, which has been taken to
presuppose a minimum average fixation (see, for instance, Rayner &

Sereno 1994). Although Jensen et al. (this volume) started from Rayner &
Sereno‟s (1994) report that average fixations in reading activities usually
range from 200 to 250 ms, their results led them to suggest a lower minimal
value, namely 175 ms; below this the authors consider that there would be
measurement error and samples would need to be excluded.
Following Jensen et al., we use 175 ms as a threshold for assessing the

reliability of our data. In order to arrive at a standard of practice for using
eye-tracking data in translation process research, we examined our data as
measured by two different data filters, Tobii Studio© and ClearView©.
Tables 1 and 2 show the average fixations for the direct and the inverse
translation tasks, respectively. Data are shown per subject and per AOI, and
tables display columns “Tobii” (35 pixels) and “ClearView” (50 pixels, 100
ms), both provided by Tobii Studio 1.5©.1 For each fixation filter (here
established according to default settings), the AOI exhibiting the greatest
1
According to the Tobii Studio 1.5© Tutorial, the Tobii Studio© filter “estimates the
position of the fixations between changes in gaze position by using a median-
estimator and by checking if adjacent fixations (in the time domain) are closer
together than a given threshold (in the spatial domain). The threshold is set under the
fixation filter settings. The value is used when calculating if the gaze point belongs to
a new fixation or not [...]. The threshold value sets the maximum for how far apart
fixations are allowed to be in pixel radius and still belong to the same fixation.” The
ClearView© filter “defines the maximum distance between two points for them to be
considered [as] belonging to the same fixation and the minimum time for which gaze
needs to be within the radius to be considered a fixation”.
fixation length for ST or TT is shaded grey where “Tobii” and “ClearView”

results diverge.
Tables 1 and 2 show that the use of different fixation filters has a
strong impact on the results. The shaded areas highlight data for those
subjects where the areas with the highest number of fixations differ
depending on the filter applied. As can be seen, the two filter settings show
AOIs with different longer average fixations for four subjects in the direct
translation (S2, S6, S9, S10) and four subjects in the inverse translation
task (S3, S5, S6, S10). Moreover, with ClearView© the data for S7 and S8
fall below 175 ms in four cases, and are therefore inaccurate. However,
with Tobii Studio© the values are higher than 175 ms for all subjects
(except S8 in the TT area of the inverse translation) and, consequently,
these results are considered to be accurate and reliable. This finding also
has implications for the overall means of the fixation length in the AOIs; it
differs, especially if we disregard the two subjects who have inaccurate
data according to the ClearView© fixation filter (see Mean B in the tables
above).
The same discrepancy occurs when the results for free and guided
retrospective protocols of both translation tasks are compared, as shown in
Tables 3, 4, 5 and 6.
As shown in Tables 3 to 6, the data are once again inconclusive when

different fixation filters are used, since for some of the subjects the AOI
having the longest fixation differs according to the filter. These findings
clearly demonstrate the need for standardization of the different filter
settings in future experiments. Studies reporting research on eye-tracking
and reading-related tasks should strive to standardize parameters for the
inclusion or exclusion of data so that, in the long run, results will allow
reliable comparisons between different studies and across data samples.
Discrepancies notwithstanding, both free and guided protocols
appear to involve reading tasks that yield data on fixation length that can
somehow be regarded as comparable to the data obtained from the
translation tasks, since the same criterion of minimum average fixation
length is also applicable here. If this is indeed correct, the data also reveal
that the ClearView settings seem to constitute a more selective filter,
accounting for a higher number of subjects that would need to be removed
from the sample used (S3, S6, S7, and S10 for the free protocols performed
after the direct translation; S3 and S6 for the guided protocols regarding the
direct translation task; S4 and S6 for the free protocols performed after the
inverse translation; and S6 and S7 for the guided protocols with reference
to the inverse translation task).
4.2 Second dimension: an analysis of time and fixation count
The second research dimension analyses directionality-related issues in the

three phases of the translation process. It attempts to correlate the time
spent on each phase with fixation counts in two major AOIs (again, the ST
area and the TT area) for both inverse and direct translation. These are also
carried out separately for free and guided protocols, whose fixation counts
were investigated for the same AOIs.
Figure 1 below shows the total time each subject spent on each
translation task.
9000 8626
8000
7000
6000
4855 5040 4856
5000 4707 4888
4435 4452 4281 4331
4000 3896
3620
3211
3000 2628 2716
2372 2192 2346 2088
2124
2000
1000
0
DT IT DT IT DT IT DT IT DT IT IT DT IT DT IT DT IT DT IT DT
S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 S8 S9 S10
Figure 1: Total absolute time (in seconds) spent on the translation tasks
Legend: DT = Direct translation, IT = Inverse translation
Left of the dotted line in Figure 1 are the subjects who carried out a direct
translation task first, right of the dotted line, the subjects who carried out an
inverse translation task first. According to Figure 1, there is an effect of the
first task upon the second, with eight subjects spending more time on the
first task than on the second, regardless of whether it was a direct or an
inverse translation task. Among the subjects who started with the direct
translation task, only S5 spent more time on the second task. Among the
subjects who started with the inverse translation, only S7 spent more time
on the second task (direct translation). A paired samples t test excluding
these two subjects shows that this impact is statistically significant, both if
S10, who presented a very high difference in time allotted to each task, is
included (t = 2,375; df = 7; p = 0,049) and when this subject is excluded
(t = 3,716; df = 6; p = 0,010). Furthermore, Figure 1 also shows that the
subjects tend to allot a similar amount of time (less than 20 % difference) to
either type of translation, regardless of directionality, with the exception of
S3, S8, and especially S10 (27,6 %, 25,0 %, and 43,3 %, respectively).
Taken together, these results suggest that neither the texts themselves nor
directionality of the task account for the variance in total time spent. Task
order seems to be the only variable which has a systematic impact on the
duration of the task of all subjects as it introduces a decrease in time spent.
It should be borne in mind that ST complexity was analogous and
thus did not constitute a variable in our study and that directionality did not
point to substantial differences in performance. Thus the data on the
relative time spent on each phase of the translation process (orientation,
drafting and revision) indicate that the only variable having an impact on
task execution is task order.
Figure 2 shows that, from a within-subject perspective, each subject
exhibits a relatively similar pattern of time distribution for both the direct
and the inverse translation tasks. Subjects S6, S7, S9 and S10 allotted
virtually no time to orientation, and then spent more time revising the task,
a phase which involves resorting to external support (as observed in the
replay of the Tobii Studio 1.5©). The data show that this can be explained
by the strategy chosen for problem solving and the consultation of external
resources for words or collocations while writing the first draft of the
translation.
Figure 2 also reveals that little time is devoted to initial orientation
(less than 2 %, or 1 minute when we look at the absolute values), the major
exceptions being S8 for both tasks and S5 for the inverse translation task
(with an orientation length higher than 3 %, or of approximately 3 minutes
if we look at the absolute values). These are the only situations where the
whole text is fully read before the translation is drafted (see Section 4.3.1).
IT
S10
DT
IT
S9
DT
IT
S8
DT
IT
S7
DT
IT
S6
DT Orientation
Drafting
IT
Revision
S5
DT
IT
S4
DT
IT
S3
DT
IT
S2
DT
IT
S1
DT
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Figure 2: Relative time allocated to each phase of the translation process per subject and
per task (values not included in order to avoid information overload in the graph)
Legend: DT = Direct translation, IT = Inverse translation
Figure 2 can be complemented with information from Table 7 below.

As shown in Table 7 and Figure 2, subjects tended to allocate more revision

time to the inverse translation task. Only S4 and S7 took longer to perform
revision in the direct translation task. As for the drafting phase, there is a
tendency for subjects to allocate more time to drafting in the first
translation task, the only exception being S5. The means provided in Figure
2 for both the revision and drafting phases show clearly what happens in
the sample, despite the marked range of inter-individual variation in the
values found. On the other hand, the means do not represent the initial
orientation phase accurately, since there seems to be no clear tendency,
with subjects allocating different amounts of time to this phase. Note also
that the findings proved to be statistically significant only for the parameter
of directionality in the revision phase (t = 2,313; df = 9; p = 0,046).
These differences in the drafting phase (associated with task order)
and in the revision phase (correlated with directionality) can also be
matched with the AOI which registers the higher fixation counts. Tables 8,
9, and 10 illustrate this point.
The three tables contain raw data of fixation counts. The reason for
not applying a fixation filter in this case is that any translation task involves
ongoing changes of fixation between AOIs (in this case, ST and TT areas).
Such ongoing changes are not typical of reading processes but are crucial
to the translation process as it allows insights into whether the ST area or
the TT area required more attention of the subjects in terms of fixation
count.2
2
According to the Tobii Studio 1.5© Tutorial, “fixation filters are used to group gaze
data into meaningful fixations. Many different algorithms for fixation definition have
been proposed and are available among researchers and practitioners. In part, the
purpose of a study influences which types of fixation filters are most suitable.”
Table 8 shows no fixation counts in the TT area, which can obviously be

interpreted as meaning that orientation seems to involve reading or
skimming the ST, either partially or totally. Furthermore, the subjects who
spent longer orienting themselves, S5 (in the inverse translation task) and
S8 (in both tasks), have a higher fixation count in comparison with the
other subjects. This observation requires further studies to test significance
– if the relation between fixation count and time allotted to each translation
phase proves to be significant, it may indicate that it would be better to
compare subjects‟ fixation counts proportional to time.
As regards the drafting phase, for all ten subjects there are more
fixations in the source-text area than in the target-text area in the direct
translation task (except for S10), the same trend being also observed for
eight out of ten subjects in the inverse translation task (apart from S1 and
S5). In the revision phase, both translation tasks display the same tendency,
though in this case there is a higher fixation count in the TT area. These
patterns for the drafting and revision phases may show that fixation count
per se in ST and TT AOIs may not be a variable accounting for the
different cognitive processes underlying an inverse and a direct translation
task.
Fixation data on ST and TT AOIs can also be compared with
fixations during the retrospective protocols. Tables 11 and 12 provide data
on the fixation count for both free and guided recall.
As shown in Table 11, subjects have different behaviours in terms of
fixation counts on the AOIs of the free recall protocol, although the overall
mean points out to higher fixation counts in the TT AOI. Conversely, Table
12 shows that subjects (except for S10 in the inverse translation task) have
higher fixation counts in the ST area.
Taken together, these data on fixation show that revision as compared with
drafting, and free recall as compared with guided recall, provoke different
processes, especially because they are inherently related to different areas
of the screen. This will be shown in more detail in our analysis of a text
string in the next section.
4.3 Third dimension: the study of gaze on a particular text string in three
different tasks
The third dimension focuses on the analysis of one of the five elements
scrutinized in the guided recall protocol, namely a text string in the English
ST, where the conjunctive adjunct “Finally” ends an enumeration. This
string was chosen because the items in the list concluding with “Finally”
were not explicitly signalled by typical enumerating conjunctions and were
distributed across the whole source text. This was assumed to require a
great deal of processing effort on behalf of the subjects. For the guided
protocol, we assumed that during their response to our question on the
enumerating string the subjects‟ eyes would attempt to locate and fixate the
items of the list.
Our analysis of this particular text string is based both on data
retrieved in the orientation, drafting and revision phases of the direct
translation task and on the free and guided retrospective protocols. Just as
in our first and second research questions, the analysis pursued in the third
dimension also raises methodological issues and aims at putting forward a
new way to triangulate key logging, eye tracking and recall protocols.
4.3.1 Investigating the processing of text strings during task performance

and free recall
In the orientation phase of the task, nine out of the ten subjects did not read
the whole text, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Heat map overlapping fixation data for the initial orientation phases of S1-S10; circle
indicates the conjunctive adjunct “Finally”
Heat maps of eye-tracking data show that subjects basically concentrated

their gaze on the dark grey areas shown in Figure 3, which may be taken to
mean that they read the title or part of the title and promptly started the
drafting phase. Blurred light grey portions of the text may be associated
with random eye movements, especially when subjects saw the Translog
screen for the first time. Therefore, as far as initial orientation is concerned,
there seems to be no gaze activity on the text string containing the
conjunctive adjunct “Finally” (circled in Figure 3) or previous items in the
enumeration. As shown through a gaze plot in Figure 4, S8 is the only
subject who shows some initial orientation focusing on this particular text
string (S5, mentioned in Section 4.2, read the whole text only for the
inverse translation task). The overall lack of fixations on “Finally”,
alongside individual observations of each subject‟s fixations through the
replay provided by Tobii Studio 1.5©, suggests that there was no
problematization of this item in the orientation phase (except apparently for
S8, who read through the whole text).
Figure 4: Partial gaze plot of S8 orientation phase
As shown in Figure 4, there are no backward movements when S8 first

reads “Finally”. In other words, S8 has a linear reading, which might
indicate that the subject did not have any difficulty in processing the
cohesive device realized by the conjunctive adjunct or, alternatively, that he
did not realize that it was actually completing a series of facts and not
merely functioning as a discourse device signalling that the text was
coming to an end.
Figure 5: Linear protocols for the conjunctive adjunct “Finally” in the drafting phase of the
direct translation process;  indicates a pause interval up to 5 seconds
This linearity in the eye movements can be seen not only in S8‟s orientation
phase, but also in the orientation phases of the other subjects. Figure 5
presents Translog linear representations for the translation of “Finally”,
with subjects predominantly showing a linear pattern in drafting.
The conjunctive adjunct was not a point of concern for any of the
participants, apparently with the exception of S1 and S8, whose data
showed pauses before they actually translated the word. Figures 6 and 7
show the gaze plots for S1 and S8, respectively, as they read the source text
and produced the target text.
Figure 6: S1‟s gaze plot prior to the translation of “Finally” by “Enfim”

The replay of Tobii Studio 1.5© recordings shows that S1 had a pause of
approximately 30 seconds because the subject browsed the Internet to find
a translation for “Finally”. The Tobii gaze plot, however, shows no
regression in the subject‟s gaze. The subject focuses on “Finally” for a
moment, reads the beginning of the clause complex (“Finally, pulmonary
thromboembolism”) and consults Babylon© online for a translation.
As for S8, the Tobii gaze plot shows that the 10-second pause prior
to the translation of “Finally” seems to be connected with the subject
rechecking the previous nominal group (“consequent pulmonary
vasculopathy”) in the ST.
Figure 7: S8‟ gaze plot immediately prior to the translation of “Finally” by “Por fim”
Translog linear protocols and Tobii gaze plots show no revision of the first
and final translation of the conjunctive adjunct “Finally” given by any of
the translators in the drafting phase. The pattern for all subjects is similar to
that shown in Figure 8 for S2.
Figure 8: S2‟s gaze plot onto “Finally” and surroundings in the revision phase
In general, the free protocols did not prompt any comments by the subjects,
and no regression in eye movement was found for any subject. Most of the
subjects focused on the TT area while verbalizing. S2‟s gaze in Figure 9
can be considered as a prototypical example of the way free retrospective
protocols unfolded.
Figure 9: S2‟s gaze plot onto “Finally” and surroundings in free protocol
There is no linearity in the gaze, and eye movements seem to be random

rather than recursive. On the whole, the data shows that there was no
metacognitive activity related to the text string and that there was no
impact of the translation of “Finally” on the processing of the ST and on
the production of the TT.
4.3.2 Tracking cohesive relations during guided recall

For the recording of guided retrospective protocols, as a standard practice
observed in the Translog Supervisor screen, the ST area was shown in the
upper half of the screen and the TT area appeared in the bottom half. 3
3
We have opted for the standard Translog presentation with the ST being shown above the TT.
One may hypothesize that there could have been an impact on the results, had the texts been
placed in a reverse order or left and right to each other. Nevertheless, we assume that the
Translog upper/lower presentation of ST/TT areas on the screen follows what is standard
practice and does not constitute an unfamiliar visualisation to the subjects.
Subjects could see both source and target texts in their entirety. In the
guided protocol, subjects were asked, among other activities, to find
“Finally” in the ST and then to answer the question “Why is there „Finally‟
in this part of the text?” Table 13 gives an assessment of the answers
provided by the subjects to the question posed, measured as being “non-
satisfactory” when subjects could not provide any adequate explanation;
“partially satisfactory” when subjects showed evidence that they could see
the function of the conjunctive adjunct even if they could not identify the
previous items in the list; and “satisfactory” when subjects managed to
identify the function of “Finally” as a device ending an enumeration and
could somehow find the previous items in the sequence.
Although the free retrospective protocols and the key-logged data did not
point to potential difficulties in the processing of the adjunct, only four out
of ten subjects were able to identify “Finally” as the last element in a list.
The analysis of Table 13 along with eye-tracking data clearly divides
the ten subjects into two groups. The first group, including S1, S2, S3, S4,
S5, and S10, failed to attribute to “Finally” a concluding role in the
enumeration. Neither their gaze nor their verbalizations provided evidence
of metacognitive activity and awareness of the role played by the adjunct.
This group of subjects basically attributed to “Finally” a temporal meaning
or a discourse function role as a device signalling that the text was coming
to an end instead of realizing that there was a series of items making up the
enumeration ended by “Finally” and that this enumeration had been
signposted by the numeral expression “a variety” in the clause “The

pathogenesis of PHT in SCD is probably due to a variety of factors”. The
subjects clearly failed to provide a satisfactory answer, even though they
did mention some of the elements that could loosely be associated with the
enumeration under scrutiny. The second group, formed by S6, S7, S8, and
S9, revealed higher metacognitive activity and awareness of the issues at
stake.
In the first group, S1 answered the question without looking at the
text. Then he looked at the adjunct and replied that “Finally” establishes a
relationship between people suffering from certain diseases and those
affected by sickle cell disease. S2 also fixated on the conjunctive adjunct
and answered that the text describes the development of the disease,
mentioning that one might develop pulmonary thrombosis. S3 looked at
“Finally” and answered without further delay that it introduces a
conclusion. S4 looked at “Finally” and then randomly across the ST. The
subject also answered instantaneously that “Finally” relates to occurrences
of pulmonary hypertension in patients with sickle cell syndrome. S5 read
the sentence sequentially and stated that “Finally” indicates a conclusion
that pulmonary hypertension is associated with sickle cell disease. S10
answered immediately that “Finally” indicates a conclusion associating
pulmonary hypertension with sickle cell disease.
The second group (formed by S6, S7, S8, and S9) behaved
differently. S6 moved his eyes across the screen up to the title in an attempt
to identify all the elements of the enumeration. However, although there
was no technical problem for data synchronization, the subject‟s eye
movements and his verbalizations could not be easily matched in our
analysis in that the verbalizations referred to a text portion different from
the one where fixations could be seen. S6 referred to a series of factors
which finally led to pulmonary thromboembolism. S7 also mentioned a
number of factors in his answer to the question posed, but did not gaze
across the text in his search for an answer. Finally, S9 read the whole
sentence and went back to the previous one as the subject stated that
pulmonary thromboembolism and progressive endothelial damage can also
contribute to the pathogenesis of pulmonary hypertension (which refers
back to the sentence where we find “a variety of factors”).
S8 is a special case. He appears to be the subject with the highest

level of metacognitive awareness when performing the direct translation
task. As shown in Figure 10, S8‟s gaze moved randomly (mostly in the TT
area) as he stated that “Finally” is the last element in a series of
considerations about a possible relationship between pulmonary
hypertension and sickle cell disease.
Figure 10: S8‟s random gaze plot while trying to account for the function of “Finally”
At the end of his recall, unprompted by any question, the subject explained
that he immediately opted for “Por fim” („At last‟) rather than
“Finalmente” („Finally‟) in his target text in the drafting phase, the former
being considered by the subject a device in Portuguese which is more
successful in terms of conveying the meaning of conclusion in a line of
argumentation. His reflections seem to refer to the two possible meanings
construed by “Finally” as a concluding device in a series of enumerated
items or a discourse device signalling a final move in a text.
5. Conclusions
Conclusions gathered from our exploratory study can be grouped according

to each of the three dimensions of analysis pursued.
As regards dimension 1, results obtained point to the need for
standardization of procedures in the treatment and analysis of eye-tracking
data as the choice of filter and the type of data used can yield different
results. As we have sought to show, ClearView, for instance, seems to be
more prone than Tobii to yield data falling below the threshold of 175 ms,
below which subjects have to be excluded. Another relevant conclusion
deriving from dimension 1 suggests that the criterion for minimum average
fixation length with a lower minimal value of 175 ms equally applies to
translation process data and to free and guided retrospective protocols,
which are, therefore, comparable.
Regarding dimension 2, our data shows no significant impact of
directionality on total and relative times spent on direct and inverse
translation tasks. The main impact is task order, as subjects showed a
tendency to allocate more time to the execution of the first task. However,
when the orientation, drafting and revision phases are considered
separately, directionality does have an impact on the process, with an
increase in the amount of revision time carried out by most of the subjects
in the inverse translation task in spite of task order. As for fixations, these
occur predominantly in the source-text area during the drafting and revision
phases both in the direct and inverse translation tasks. In terms of fixation
counts in the AOIs of the free recall protocols, the overall mean points to
higher fixation counts in the TT AOI (though mean in this case is not
representative of the whole sample). As far as the guided protocols are
concerned, higher fixation counts are found in the ST AOI. As stated
before, the data on eye fixations show that revision as compared with
drafting, and free recall as compared with guided recall entail different
processes, especially because they are inherently related to different areas
of the screen. These patterns may suggest that fixation count per se in ST
and TT AOIs may not be a variable accounting for the different cognitive
processes underlying direct and inverse translation tasks.
With respect to dimension 3, it was possible to show how eye-
tracking data and retrospective verbalizations can be used together to tap
into translators‟ metacognitive activity. As far as free retrospective
protocols are concerned, subjects show a tendency to focus on the TT area.
Free protocols do not add information to initial orientation, and subjects
usually start protocols by speaking of strategies and general problems (e.g.,
terminology issues). Subjects usually cease their recalling when they come
to the end of the drafting phase. Their verbalizations primarily focus on
“silence” and “changes” and do not provide any further information for the
conjunctive adjunct “Finally”, which was “easily” translated in the drafting
phase. As for the guided protocols, subjects usually answer questions
hastily without much thought. They show backward and forward eye
movements which seem to concentrate especially on the ST area as a means
of confirmation of the questions asked.
Most subjects clearly failed to provide a satisfactory answer to the
question they were asked and also showed no evidence of being actively
engaged in finding possible answers on the ST or TT which appeared on
the screen. Among the few subjects who reveal higher metacognitive
activity and awareness of the question they were asked, S8 is the only
subject who could actually provide a satisfactory answer to account for the
function of the conjunctive adjunct “Finally” in the rendition he had just
come about with.
On the whole, verbal protocols generated in conjunction with eye-
tracking data prove useful for probing the relation between the allocation of
time and the level of metacognitive activity. In sum, the study shows the
feasibility of synchronizing retrospective verbalizations, gaze movements
and fixations as the subjects‟ gaze moved across the screen from ST to TT,
therefore opening a new window on the investigation of translators‟
metacognitive activity.
References
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investigate the translation process of foreign language learners and
experienced translators. In F. Alves (ed.) Triangulating Translation.
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Ericsson, K. A. & Simon, H. A. 1984. Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as
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Amsterdam: Benjamins. 69–95.
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(eds) Looking at Eyes: Eye-Tracking Studies of Reading and Translation
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comprehension. Psychological Review 87: 329-354.
O‟Brien, S. 2006. Eye-tracking and translation memory matches. Perspectives:
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Rayner, K. & Sereno, S. C. 1994. Eye Movements in Reading. In M. A.
Gernsbacher (ed.). Handbook of Psycholinguistics. San Diego: Academic
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moving ahead. Discourse Studies 8(3): 423–459.
Experts exposed
Barbara Dragsted, Inge Gorm Hansen & Henrik Selsøe Sørensen
Abstract
This article reports on an explorative study of translation processes and

products of expert translators working under different oral and written
translation conditions, i.e. sight translation, sight translation with speech
recognition and written translation. We analyse three translators with
varying levels of experience with speech recognition in order to study
differences in time consumption and translation behaviour between the
translators and the different translation modes. The translator with high
speech recognition expertise differed from the less experienced translators
in terms of time consumption as well as general behaviour. A tentative
analysis of the translation output produced under the written versus the
speech recognition condition indicated that a spoken translation may
contain a higher number of less optimal translations in the form of calques.
1. Introduction
In this exploratory study we will examine translation processes and

performance by three expert translators on the basis of experimental
translation tasks carried out under oral and written translation conditions.
The study forms part of a research project1 which aims to explore
and extend our understanding of how translators and interpreters coordinate
reading and writing processes in translation and interpreting hybrids such
as sight translation. The sight translation process has been studied under
varying conditions (Agrifoglio 2004, Lambert 2004, Setton and Motta
2007) and compared with the written translation process (Dragsted and
Hansen 2009). The present study aims to investigate how adding speech
1
Forståelse og formulering i tolke- og oversættelseshybrider [“Comprehension and
production processes in translation and interpreting hybrids”] funded by the Danish
Research Council for Culture and Communication.
294 Barbara Dragsted, Inge Gorm Hansen & Henrik Selsøe Sørensen
recognition (SR) technology to the sight translation process, making the

oral-written hybrid even more complex, affects the process and the
behaviour of the translator. To our knowledge, the use of SR technology in
translation has not been investigated in translation process studies before,
but based on previous studies comparing (normal) sight translation with
written translation (Dragsted and Hansen 2009), we believe that the
integration of SR technology may potentially lead to time and cost savings.
Below we will examine how sight translation with SR differs from sight
translation without SR and from written translation.
The study compares three expert translators with varying degrees of
experience using SR technology, which automatically converts speech to
text (see Jurafsky and Martin 2000: 235–284 for an introduction to SR
technology).
The aim is to clarify whether the time savings found when translators
work in the oral mode without SR can also be achieved when they use an
SR system and have to reflect on their own written output as it gradually
unfolds on the screen. By analysing pauses and gaze patterns, we will
investigate how time and effort are distributed among different translation
subtasks (drafting and revision) and how the participants plan production
units. Interviews with the participants will provide insights into the
participants‟ normal working routines, serving as support for our
experimental data. Finally, translations of a selection of terms and
expressions will be analysed in an attempt to detect patterns of differences
in the quality of the spoken and written output.
2. Features of oral and written modalities
Spoken and written language production are generally considered to be two

fundamentally different activities (Chafe and Danielewicz 1987, Chafe and
Tannen 1987). Similarly, working methods and strategies applied by
interpreters producing spoken language are assumed to be different from
those applied by translators producing written language. Sight translation is
a hybrid between the written and oral modality and can be characterised as
“a specific type of written translation as well as a variant of oral
interpretation” (Lambert 2004: 298), where the source text (ST) is written
and the target text (TT) is spoken (Agrifoglio 2004: 43; Setton and Motta
Experts exposed 295
2007: 203). Sight translation using an SR system adds a further element to

the spoken-written complex in that the ST is written and the TT is produced
orally but then transformed into a written text.
Sight translation has traditionally been treated primarily as a type of
simultaneous interpreting because it appears to have more in common with
simultaneous interpretation (e.g. time pressure, anticipation and the oral
nature of the task) than with written translation (Lambert 2004: 298).
However, it differs from both consecutive and simultaneous interpreting in
various ways. First of all, the ST segment continues to be visually
accessible to the translator (Agrifoglio 2004: 44; Gile 1997: 204), which
implies that there is no memory effort of the kind involved in traditional
simultaneous and consecutive interpreting (Gile 1997: 203). Moreover,
sight translation is not paced by the source language speaker, meaning that
the interpreter has more flexibility in terms of the speed of delivery.
However, it seems that the interpreter will, under normal circumstances, be
intent on producing a smooth delivery (Agrifoglio 2004: 45; Gile 1995:
166; Mead 2002: 74, 82).
Translators, unlike simultaneous interpreters, process one translation
unit after another, according to Gile (1995: 101–106). They alternate
between reading and comprehending source-language (SL) units and
writing target-language (TL) renditions of the translation unit, which they
then check, and edit if they find it necessary. The degree to which the
translation process is as sequential as described here may depend on the
individual translator‟s level of expertise (De Groot 1997: 30–32; Dragsted
2005: 54–67, Dragsted, forthcoming). Yet, there is no doubt that translators
doing written translations process segments fundamentally differently from
interpreters. Interpreters start to produce TL output simultaneously with
comprehending SL input (Gile 1995: 169–170) while at the same time
monitoring their own interpreted output (Lambert 2004: 297).
The time constraints characterising interpreting are also to some
extent present in sight translation. Therefore, sight translation, like
simultaneous interpreting, seems to involve elements of shared attention,
making it a more demanding process with a higher cognitive load than in
written translation. This hypothesis will be investigated below as will the
assumption that the use of SR technology further adds to the complexity of
the process because the oral output also has a written representation.
Apart from investigating behavioural differences between written

translation and sight translation with and without SR, we will consider
output from the three different modes. Chafe and Danielewicz (1987) stress
differences in the variety of vocabulary between spoken and written output
by focusing on “how speakers and writers choose words and phrases
appropriate to what they want to say” and pointing out that “speakers must
make such choices very quickly whereas writers have time to deliberate,
and even to revise their choices when they are not satisfied. As a result,
written language, no matter what its purpose or subject matter, tends to
have a more varied vocabulary than spoken” (Chafe and Danielewicz 1987:
86). In other words, writers can take, in principle, as long as they want to
find an appropriate word, whereas speakers “may typically settle on the
first words that occur to them” (Chafe and Danielewicz 1987: 88). We will
study a selection of translated terms and phrases from the three different
translation modes to see if the sight translation tasks show traces of having
been produced orally.
3. Expertise in translation
Expertise and expert performance have been studied extensively in a wide

variety of domains and disciplines (Ericsson and Smith 1991, Ericsson et
al. 2006) and generally refer to “the manifestation of skills and
understanding resulting from the accumulation of a large body of
knowledge” (Chi 2006a: 167), or more specifically “the characteristics,
skills, and knowledge that distinguish experts from novices and less
experienced people” (Ericsson et al. 2006: 3). The contrastive approach is
sometimes referred to as relative expertise as distinct from exceptional or
absolute expertise (Chi 2006b: 21–22). For the purpose of our definition of
expertise in translation, we have adopted the relative approach, which
assumes that expertise is a level of proficiency that novices can achieve.
Since the professional domains of translation and interpreting have
many characteristics in common and our experiments include both written
and oral translation, such as sight translation, which we consider a hybrid
between translation and interpreting (Dragsted & Hansen 2008), we draw
on Ericsson‟s findings in his paper on expertise in interpreting (Ericsson
2000/2001: 187–220). Thus, Ericsson‟s argument that “it is likely that elite
Experts exposed 297
interpreters have studied and practiced interpreting for 10–20 years”

(Ericsson 2000/2001: 213) has been included in our definition of expertise
and our participant selection criteria, although academic qualifications in
translation and several years of practice are not necessarily reliable
predictors of excellence (Ericsson 2000/2001: 189). For the purpose of our
analysis we concur with Englund Dimitrova, who assumed that “a large
amount of experience in translation is potentially concomitant with
expertise in translation” (Englund Dimitrova 2005: 65–66).
4. Research design and method
4.1 Participants
Table 1. SR expertise overview

SR SR semi- SR expert
novice expert
Translation experience2 11 years 16 years 39 years
Experience with oral translation: SR and None SR: 2 years SR: 9 years
dictation (transcription by typist) Dictation: 13
years
Share of oral translation of total work – 5–10% 95%
The participants under scrutiny in our experiments were three professional

translators who all hold MA degrees in translation (English  Danish) and
LSP.3 They all have Danish as their mother tongue, and have several years
of professional experience, working bi-directionally. They were selected on
the basis of their general expertise and their varying degrees of previous
experience with SR: one translator had never used SR before and was
characterised as an „SR novice‟; one translator had some experience with
SR and used it regularly in his work, and was characterised as an „SR semi-
expert‟; and finally, one translator had extensive experience with SR and
used it in many different kinds of translation assignments and could be
characterised as an SR expert. For a more detailed description of the three
translators, see Table 1.
2
Number of years for which participants have studied and practised translation.
3
Language for Special Purposes, including the domains of economics, finance, law,
and science and technology.
4.2 Experimental set-up, data and procedure
Data were collected from five different experimental tasks: a reading task, a
reading-for-the-purpose-of-translation task, a sight translation task, a sight
translation task with the use of SR and a written translation task.
Translations were from Danish into English. In the reading task (Task 1),
the participants were asked to read a short text for the purpose of
comprehension as if they were reading a newspaper article.
In the reading-for-the-purpose-of-translation task (Task 2), the
participants were instructed to read a text, which they would subsequently
be asked to translate.
In the sight translation task (Task 3), the participants were asked to
produce an oral translation of a text. The text was presented to the
participants on the screen and their oral translation was recorded in
Translog Audio (see below).
In the sight translation task with SR (Task 4), the participants were
asked to produce an oral translation of a text using the speech recognition
tool Dragon Naturally Speaking 10.0 (see below). Before producing the
translation, the participants performed the minimum amount of training
required by Dragon Naturally Speaking in order for the SR tool to be able
to recognise and become familiar with each participant‟s voice and accent.
The ST was presented in the top window of the screen and the TT appeared
in the bottom window of the screen as it was produced orally by the
translator. The oral output was recorded in Translog Audio (see below).
In the written translation task (Task 5), the participants were asked to
produce a normal written translation of a text. The ST was presented in the
top window of the screen and the TT was produced in the bottom window.
We logged the participants‟ keystrokes in Translog.
For all five tasks, we tracked the participants‟ eye movements; for an
introduction to eye-tracking during reading, see Clifton et al. (2007),
Radach et al. (2004), Rayner (1998); and for an introduction to eye-
tracking and its use in translation research, see O‟Brien (2006) and
Göpferich (2008). We used a Tobii 1750 remote eye tracker, which runs at
a frame-rate of 50 Hz and uses binocular eye tracking.4 The texts were
4
Tobii 1750, see http://www.tobii.se.
Experts exposed 299
presented on a TFT display with a resolution of 1280x1024 pixels.

Participants sat 60 cm from the screen, and were calibrated with a standard
9-point grid. We monitored the translation process and registered time
consumption using Translog (Jakobsen and Schou 1999, Jakobsen 1999),
and video-recorded the entire experiment. The spoken translation output
(Tasks 3 and 4) was logged in Translog Audio, which creates an mp3 file
of the speech produced during the translation process and at the same time
logs keystrokes (if any). The written translation (Task 5) was recorded in
the standard version of Translog performing keystroke logging.
The five Danish texts of approximately 100 words each were
excerpts from the chairman‟s statement at the 2009 annual general meeting
of a major Danish bank, Danske Bank. Three of the texts (C, D and E) were
translated into English.
Table 2. Task overview
Task Text Technology
Task 1: Text A Eye-tracker, Translog, video
Reading for comprehension 111 words
Task 2: Text B Eye-tracker, Translog, video
Reading for translation 109 words
Task 3: Text C Eye-tracker, Translog Audio, video
Sight translation without SR 113 words
Task 4: Text D Eye-tracker, Translog Audio, video,
Sight translation with SR 113 words SR
Task 5: Text E Eye-tracker, Translog, video
Written translation 114 words
The text produced orally under the sight translation condition (Task C) was
transcribed, and this transcription as well as the SR output and the written
output from Texts D and E were sent to the translators afterwards for post-
editing. The translators were asked to register the time it took them to edit
the text and to bring it up to the standard they would normally aim at if this
had been a task commissioned by a business client.
In addition to collecting quantitative data from eye-tracking,
keystroke logging and SR, we performed retrospective interviews asking
the participants about the experimental situation and their usual working
habits and routines. The interviews served not only as support for the
quantitative data, but also as a data source in its own right for the above
profiles of the three expert translators.
Data analysis was performed using the eye-tracking analysis

software ClearView and the keystroke logging analysis tool Translog,
which also includes eye-tracking information and a Gaze-to-Word
Mapping (GWM) tool, which permits automatic identification of words on
the basis of gaze fixations.5
4.3 Ecological validity
Ecological validity is essential in the study of interpreting and translation

processes (Shlesinger and Malkiel 2005:178), and although our choice of
texts, the communicative situation and the experimental translation
assignments resemble real-world tasks, our study has shortcomings in
terms of ecological validity: the experimental translation tasks were
performed under lab conditions with a complex set of tools, and the
translators did not have access to the translation and language tools they
would normally use, notably Translation Memory (TM) systems, electronic
dictionaries and the web.
The participants‟ approach and behaviour during our experiments
confirmed the principle of expertise advanced by Bransford et al. (2000)
that “experts have varying levels of flexibility in their approach to new
situations” (cited in Moser-Mercer 2008: 9). Thus the novice quickly
adapted to the new situation with SR technology and was able to use basic
voice commands in the production process, whereas the SR expert was
adversely affected by the experimental set-up and in several cases lost
control due to technical obstacles that he was unprepared for. In the
interview he stated that he felt stressed and irritated when the SR system
failed to recognise his audio output, and his routine working cadence was
disrupted impairing his performance.
Thus the experimental translation situation and the workflow were
different from the participants‟ real-world working conditions and did not
meet the requirements of ecological validity, which was also mentioned by
two of the participants as a potential problem. Although this may have
impacted the process data, we generally find that the answers provided by
the translators in the retrospective interviews, regarding usual work
5
For a description of the GWM tool, see http://www.cs.uta.fi/~oleg/gwm.html.
Experts exposed 301
routines, support the quantitative data, which indicates that the translators‟
experimental behaviour was not very different from their normal behaviour
and actual practice.
5. Data analysis, results and discussion
As mentioned above, we collected data from three professional translators

with different degrees of SR expertise performing five different
experimental tasks.
5.1 Task times, monitoring and revision
We expected that the time consumption would gradually increase from

Task 1 to Task 5. As can be seen from Figure 1, our hypothesis was
generally borne out by the data. In line with what was found by Jakobsen
and Jensen (2008: 108), the translators spent more time on reading-for-
translation than on reading-for-comprehension; the translation tasks (oral
and written) were more time-consuming than both of the reading tasks, and
the participants spent more time on the written translation than on the sight
translation without SR. These results were supported by fixation count and
gaze time figures, which showed the same gradual progression from Tasks
1 to 5 (gradually increasing number of fixations and gaze time).
For the purpose of this study, we were particularly interested in the
progression from Task 3 to Task 5, i.e. the differences in task time and
behaviour between sight translation without SR and sight translation with
SR and between sight translation with SR and written translation. In a
previous study, it was shown that a significant time reduction could be
observed when comparing a translator‟s sight translation (without SR) with
the same translator‟s written translation of a similar text, without
significantly compromising the quality of the output (Dragsted and Hansen
2009).
Figure 1. Task times in Tasks 1–5 (Task 1 = Reading for comprehension, Task 2
= Reading for translation, Task 3 = Sight translation without SR, Task 4 = Sight
translation with SR, Task 5 = Written translation).
As appears from Figure 1, all three translators spent considerably more
time on sight translation with SR than on normal sight translation (without
SR). This is not surprising as sight translation with SR involves the
additional element of monitoring and editing the TT, a process which has
previously been found to be more demanding than the processing of the ST
both for professional translators (Jakobsen and Jensen 2008: 114; Dragsted,
forthcoming) and for students (Sharmin et al. 2008: 46) and sometimes as
time-consuming as the drafting phase (Englund Dimitrova 2005: 87–88).
Still, it is worth noting that the most considerable leap in task time is not
caused by the shift from reading to (sight) translation, but rather from
translation with no written representation of the TT to translation which
includes online monitoring and editing of written TT output. In other
words, time and gaze data indicate that the most demanding complication
of translation, as compared with the reading tasks, is not the actual
drafting/production of the TT, but rather the process of continuously
monitoring, assessing and editing one‟s own output. According to the SR
expert and semi-expert, the cognitive load and the attentional effort
involved in monitoring and revising SR translation output is higher than in
written translation, and revision involves more checks against the ST to
detect output errors.
Experts exposed 303
The task time differences between the oral tasks (Tasks 3 and 4)
indicate the additional time spent on online TT monitoring and editing of
SR output. However, the eye-tracking data showed that all participants also
had a higher number of fixations in the ST area of the screen in Task 4
compared with Task 3 (see Figure 2), indicating that online TT monitoring
and revision triggered regressions to ST words. It also appears from Figure
2 that there was no clear tendency for the TT area to attract more attention
than the ST area as might have been expected. Only one of the translators,
the semi-expert, confirmed this hypothesis.
Figure 2. Fixation counts for Task 3 (without SR) and Task 4 (with SR)
We expected that there would be a time reduction in both of the oral
translation conditions compared with the written translation task. As
expected, all three translators clearly spent less time on normal sight
translation (Task 3) than on the written translation task (Dragsted and
Hansen 2009), whereas one of the translators did not save time under the
SR sight translation condition compared with the written translation
condition (Figure 1). The translator who saved most time was the SR
expert, which is not surprising; it also corresponds with what he stated in
the interview, cf. below. The SR novice had only a marginal time reduction,
and the SR semi-expert produced the written translation faster than the SR
translation. Again, the semi-expert confirmed this result, stating in the
interview that his total time consumption was sometimes higher when he
used an SR system because he often spent more time on end-revision of SR
output. This also appeared to be the case in the experiment reported here,
see Figure 3, where the semi-expert took longer to revise the text in Task 4
than to draft it.
Figure 3. Distribution of time spent on drafting and time spent on revision

All the participants spent less time on the drafting of the translation in the
SR task than in the written task, but both the SR novice and the SR semi-
expert spent more time on revising the SR output than the written output.
Only the SR expert revised the SR translation faster than the written
translation, and this appears to account for his overall time savings.
The SR expert‟s speedier revision phase may be explained by various
factors. First of all, he spent relatively long time on the drafting phase
compared to the other translators, which means that he may have done most
of the revision online (but not compared with his drafting phase in Task 5,
indicating that he generally worked at a lower pace than the other
participants under the experimental condition). Secondly, his SR expertise
may enable him to make revisions faster than the less skilled translators,
and finally, he may be less sceptical towards the SR output because he is
very familiar with the system and therefore has a higher level of confidence
in its output.
In conclusion, the overall time savings that we had expected were not
generally borne out by the data. Only the SR expert saved a substantial
amount of time in Task 4 compared with Task 5, which indicates that it
requires extensive experience and routine to reach the point where time is
saved using an SR system. Regardless of the translator‟s level of
Experts exposed 305
experience with an SR tool, his/her typing skills need to be taken into

consideration: a very skilled touch-typist may never reach a point where
text can be produced faster using an SR system than using the keyboard,
and it is worth remembering that “translators‟ keyboard skills have
developed to the level where (in some cases at least) typing is almost as
immediate and automatic as speech” (Jakobsen 2003: 69–70). This may be
true of the SR novice and semi-expert, whereas the SR expert was not a
strong touch-typist and may even have „unlearned‟ his typing skills as his
SR skills developed, and he proceeded to work almost exclusively in the
oral modality.
If no time and cost savings can be achieved, there seems to be little
incentive for translators to use SR technology. Nevertheless, the semi-
expert stated that despite minimal or no time reduction, he still uses SR
technology for 5 to 10 % of his work (see Table 1 above). He emphasises
the advantages of ergonomics and physical as well as mental variation; see
Table 3. In a job which involves sitting in front of a computer and a
keyboard for many hours during the day, changing one‟s working routines
may be considered a great relief, both physically and mentally. The SR
semi-expert and the SR expert also mention the advantage of “getting
something on paper fast”, promoting the feeling of being productive.
On the other hand, the advantages of saving time should also be seen
in the light of potential disadvantages, something which was expressed by
all three translators. The SR expert and semi-expert both stress that the
translation process with an SR system is “mentally taxing” and “more
intensive, and requires a higher degree of concentration and attentional
effort”, and the SR novice foresees a “long period of practice” and a
demanding process of “thinking the translation before speaking it”, i.e.
planning (Table 3).
Thus, the three translators appear to agree that speaking your
translation is a more demanding cognitive process because it requires more
planning of the output. Below we will investigate how planning proceeds
under the oral condition.
Table 3. Participants‟ reflections on translation with SR

SR novice SR semi-expert SR expert
Time and cost – Insignificant 30–35%
savings
Advantages of Maybe Ergonomics. Saves time and money.
SR ergonomics Variation (physical and You get something on
mental). paper fast.
You get something on Easier to revise texts
paper fast. orally with SR.
Ergonomics.
Disadvantages Learning how to With SR the translation Mentally taxing.
of SR use SR in a process is more Requires more
professional intensive and requires a concentration than
context requires a high degree of writing /dictating
lot of practice and concentration and without SR.
time. attention. Voice commands (used
It is “difficult to Sensitive to for dialogue with the
think the background noise system) challenge your
translation before (translation behind memory.
speaking it”. closed doors).
Revision takes longer
(check for mis-
translations due to
fuzzy audio input)
Text type Maybe translation Running text without All texts are suited for
suited for SR of fiction tables and figures SR, but highly
formatted texts (tables
and figures) are more
time-consuming.
5.2 Planning ahead
We investigated long pauses (+2.5 sec.) in the two oral tasks (analysed in
the speech analysis and synthesis program Praat6 with an add-on script
developed for pause detection7), which were assumed to be associated with
the planning of, for instance, the next sentence or clause (Butterworth
1980: 156–157, 160), and compared the pauses and planning patterns under
the oral conditions with pauses in the written task (analysed in Translog).
Furthermore, we analysed fixation patterns in relation to spoken output in
6
See www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/, visited on June 11, 2009. Praat website with
information and downloads.
7
Developed by Miette Lennes (www.helsinki.fi/~lennes/praat-scripts/, visited on June
11, 2009).
Experts exposed 307
order to determine whether the translators fixated the ST word for which
they were currently producing/speaking a TT equivalent (whether fixations
were in sync with the word being produced), or whether they fixated words
before or after the word being produced (referred to as off sync fixations).
Off sync fixations are taken to indicate planning or monitoring.
The fixation analyses showed a difference between the fixation
pattern of the SR expert on the one hand and the SR novice and semi-
expert on the other in both oral tasks.
Figure 4. ST fixations relative to TT production
The SR novice and semi-expert had a clear preference for in sync fixations
in both sight translation tasks, whereas the SR expert frequently fixated
words other than the one being produced/translated, notably in Task 4
(sight with SR). Contrary to our expectations, the SR expert did not focus
particularly on subsequent ST words, which would be the most obvious
indication of planning ahead; rather he seemed to be orienting himself more

broadly in the immediate context, fixating words both before and after the
word being produced, which seems to signal an ongoing process of not
only planning, but more generally considering and reconsidering the text
(or a sequence of the text) as a whole. Not surprisingly, this pattern is
particularly evident in Task 4, where the translator is able to also monitor
and revise his own TT online.
The SR novice and semi-expert seemed to have a more stringent
coordination and synchronisation of ST fixations and TT output with a
relatively low percentage of off sync fixations. The majority of off sync
fixations were on subsequent words, indicating a primary focus on planning
ahead. This tendency is emphasised by the participants‟ pausing patterns.
The SR novice had production pauses of between 11 and 36 seconds before
each new sentence in both Task 3 and Task 4 (four and five pauses
respectively), and the semi-expert had nine pauses in each of the sight
translation tasks of 4 to 11 seconds usually preceding the beginning of a
new sentence or clause. The SR novice‟s and semi-expert‟s preference for
in sync fixations should thus be seen in light of the fact that preplanning
seems to have taken place before commencing the production of each new
sentence or clause, which “will reduce on-line Planning time requirements”
(Butterworth 1980: 160). The SR expert made only one pause in Task 3 (7
seconds), and 5 pauses in Task 4 (5–20 seconds), which appeared to be
associated with online revision (in one case), lexical selection (Butterworth
1980: 166) (in one case), and planning the next sentence or sub-clause (in
three cases).
Generally, the SR novice‟s and semi-expert‟s span between fixating
a ST word and producing its TT equivalent, their „eye-voice span‟ (cf. the
„eye-key span‟, Dragsted and Hansen 2008: 9, Dragsted forthcoming), was
very narrow, but their pre-planning, or „macro-planning‟ (Butterworth
1980: 159) was fairly extensive, whereas the SR expert seemed to have a
longer „eye-voice span‟ indicating more online planning and less planning
in preparation for sentences or clauses.
By comparison, Translog data from the written task revealed a
different pattern of production pauses. The SR novice had only one long
pause (3.2 sec.), and the SR semi-expert had two long pauses (2.9 and 4.3
sec.). The SR expert made 5 pauses of between 2.6 and 14 sec. One of
Experts exposed 309
these pauses clearly seemed to be associated with preplanning the next

sentence, but the remaining pauses were more likely related to lexical
selection and TT monitoring. The low occurrence of long pauses in written
translation, as compared with the oral translation tasks, indicates that in
written translation planning takes place „online‟, i.e. while writing, and
editing, the TT.
According to Gile, comparing interpreting with written translation,
“the process of translation does not in the same way require different
efforts to be synchronised” (Gile 1995: 170). On the basis of our
observations it might be argued, however, that under the oral translation
condition, the SR expert exhibits simultaneous interpreter-like behaviour
by apparently dividing his attention into several different tasks
simultaneously (Gile 1995: 161–169): producing spoken TT output,
preparing output by reading ahead in the ST, monitoring previously
produced output (Gile 1995: 37; Lambert 2004: 297) or checking for
consistency by orienting himself in the ST more broadly, synchronising
efforts without preplanning larger chunks of TT in advance.
5.3 Analysis of the quality of the translation product
The focus so far has been on the translation process and on how different
oral translation modes differ from one another and from traditional written
translation. However, an essential issue for any professional translator is
whether the quality of the translated output has a sufficiently high standard.
Hence, in the following, we tentatively propose a method by means of
which quality can be tested and compared across different translation
modes. The analysis performed below is not based on genuine ratings of
quality, but merely on frequency of occurrence in Google and on our own
intuitions.
Spoken translation may help a translator create texts that read
naturally in the target language and do this at higher speed than if the
translator had used the keyboard. On the other hand, the produced TT may
be characterised by imprecise terminology because the oral mode
encourages the translator to use words and phrases which spring to mind
instantly (and often are more general), rather than selecting more precise
terms (Chafe and Danielewicz 1987: 86, 88). As a result, the revision phase
becomes time-consuming as shown above. It is also possible that the output

produced orally contains a higher number of calques of words and syntactic
structures, i.e. negative interference (Toury 1995: 275). However, there
may be many individual differences between translators, depending on
their experience with using SR (see above) and on their familiarity in
general with the oral mode (Dragsted and Hansen 2009). Yet, there is
definitely a need to gain more detailed knowledge about how the
translation process may be optimised when individual parameters meet new
technological facilities in the race for cost-effective high-quality
translations.
Our proposed method for analysing the qualitative effects of two of
the investigated translation modes, oral translation with SR vs. traditional
written translation (Tasks 4 and 5) consists of three steps.
As a first step, we identify segments in the TT for which the
participants – for better or worse – have produced noticeably different
solutions (Campbell 2000: 38). Focusing on such units has the advantage
that we do not waste time on trivial segments which do not challenge the
knowledge and skills of the translator and which cannot be expected to help
detect measurable differences between spoken and written translation. The
second step is to classify the optimal or less optimal translation solutions.
The classification should be based on terminology, style, word order,
collocations, metaphors, etc. In particular, elements which are deemed to
be calques, as well as excellent solutions found in order to avoid calques,
are of interest. In the present case, elements deemed to be calques have
been underscored. The third and final step is to identify patterns of
translation and relate them to spoken and written translation respectively.
Tables 4 and 5 give lists of such segments from Tasks 4 and 5, which
were chosen so as to be comparable in length and level of difficulty. An
asterisk indicates the optimal solution. White text in a black cell signals a
particularly inventive solution proposed by only one translator. Grey cells
indicate less optimal translations including calques. The other unmarked
divergent translations involve minor stylistic inaccuracies.
Experts exposed 311
Table 4. Task 5 (written translation): examples of divergent translator decisions

SL SR novice SR semi- SR expert Comment
expert
1 statsgaranti mod national government government term and
guarantee to guarantee guarantee style
protect against* against*
2 Sikkerhedsnettet safety safety net* safety net* term
network
3 kunne finde were able to were able to became able term and
likviditet i procure procure the to obtain style
fornødent omfang appropriate requisite ready money
liquidity liquidity* as necessary
4 Der kom derfor en Consequently, An act was An act was term, word
lov a statute was consequently therefore order and
introduced introduced made collocation
(Consequent-
ly, an act was
passed*)
5 udstrække … extend the prolong* expand the term and
tidsmæssigt timeframe for time limit of style
6 Konjunkturbilledet business economic economic term
trends outlook situation*
7 kunne forudse et foreshadowed Increasing prediction of word class /
stigende pres på mounting pressure was increasing term
pressure on anticipated pressure on
on*
8 rejse kapital floating raising raising collocation
capital capital* capital*
9 På de On the In On preposition
internationale international international international and definite
kapitalmarkeder capital capital capital article
markets markets* markets
[6630] [23600] [19300]8
10 I en sådan When markets In such a In a market style
markedsudvikling develop as market development
they do situation* such as this
In this paper we will restrict ourselves to establishing whether calques are

more frequent in spoken than in written translation. Calques are defined as
“deviations from normal, codified practices of the target system”, which
occur because “phenomena pertaining to the make-up of the source text
8
In some cases, Google may be used for documenting the optimal translation. The
figure in square brackets indicates google hits on July 14, 2009. The missing variant,
“in the international capital markets”, returns 19800 hits. The conclusion in this case
would be that the SR novice‟s solution is less common but nevertheless widely used.
tend to be transferred to the target text” (Toury 1995: 275), i.e. what Toury
refers to as negative transfer. This includes any expression or syntactic
structure introduced into the TL by translating it from the SL in a way that
seems awkward to TL readers. A calque thus implies that a more
appropriate equivalent exists, but that translators subconsciously have
transferred a SL element to the TL because they could not find the optimal
equivalent on the spot.
Table 5. Task 4 (sight with SR): examples of divergent translator decisions
SL SR novice SR semi- SR expert Comment
expert
1 stor finansiel major major major term
virksomhed financial financial financial
company* undertaking company*
2 politiske political political political term
tilkendegivelser statements intentions to indications
this effect*
3 blev reddet was would not be was saved term (was
rescued saved bailed out*)
4 medførte at … frøs led to a as a result … this meant style and term
fast frozen … froze that…froze (caused … to
solid dry up*)
5 markedet for market for liquidity liquidity term (money
likviditet liquid market market market*)
assets
6 Redningspakker rescue rescue bail-out term
packages packages packages*
7 genoprette tilliden til reinforce restore restore style
the trusts in confidence confidence
in* in*
8 Pengeinstitutter financial banks* financial term
institutions institutions
9 og [tilliden] til, at… and the and with the Parataxis (and
(literally: and the trust that … because… further in the
[confidence] that….) benefit that Governments‟
intentions to
…*)
10 indgik en politisk made a entered into entered into style
aftale om political a political a political
agreement agreement agreement
to to* to*
11 medført, at led to resulted in caused […] style and term
[pengemarkederne] frozen […] frozen [..] to freeze (caused … to
var frosset til over dry up*)
Experts exposed 313
Element 9 in Table 5 provides an example of a syntactic structure that has

been calqued, but in most cases the calque relates to lexical selection.
The experiment reported above does not provide data sufficient for
drawing conclusions. In particular the limited number of translators in our
experiment did not make it possible for the same text to be translated by
more than one translator in each pre-defined category. Thus it is not
possible to compare how problems in the same text were solved by
different translators.
A preliminary comparison of types of problems in the two texts
(Tables 4 and 5) indicates that the less optimal solutions are more frequent
in the spoken translation than in the written translation. The number of
calques in the spoken translation (15) is higher than the number of calques
in the written translation (5), but no conclusions may be drawn on the basis
of these limited data.
6. Conclusions
We have reported on a small-scale exploratory study examining three

professional translators‟ use of SR technology. Thus, our conclusions are
tentative and primarily aim at showing suggestive trends for further
research and larger-scale follow-up studies.
Process data from translation under different translation conditions
(sight translation without SR, sight translation with SR and written
translation) revealed that only one of the three translators, namely the SR
expert, achieved substantial time savings when producing a translation
using SR as compared with written translation, but that all three translators
produced the sight translation without SR considerably faster than the
written translation and the translation with SR. This led us to conclude that
the most demanding complication of the translation process, as compared
with the reading tasks also carried out as part of the experiment, was not
the actual drafting/production of the translation, but the constant
monitoring and editing of TT output, which seems to be an ongoing
negotiation process in the attempt to arrive at the optimal translation
solution. To this should be added the fact that the SR novice and semi-
expert spent more time on post-editing SR output than their written
translation output.
Differences between the SR expert on the one hand and the SR

novice and semi-expert on the other were also found when comparing the
participants‟ pausing patterns and mode of planning their production under
the oral conditions. The SR novice and semi-expert showed a clear
preference for pre-planning each sentence or clause, whereas the SR expert
invariably went straight ahead, planning and monitoring TT simultaneously
with TT production. This led us to assume that the behaviour of the SR
expert resembles that of a simultaneous interpreter where comprehension,
production and monitoring efforts are synchronised.
Despite the fact that no time saving was achieved by the SR novice
and semi-expert, there still seems to be a case for using SR in translation.
First of all, time can indeed be saved once the translator becomes
sufficiently familiar with SR technology and with working in the oral
mode. Furthermore, the SR expert and semi-expert stressed other potential
advantages such as ergonomics and mental and physical variation as well
as the satisfaction of producing a first draft very quickly.
Nevertheless, to our knowledge not very many translators use SR in
their work, at least not in Denmark. The translator‟s decision to introduce
SR technology into his/her working environment may be influenced by
various factors. First of all, the translator must be prepared to invest time
and effort in becoming familiar with the system and be confident that
future time savings will eventually compensate for time invested in the
learning process. Secondly, the translator must have faith in the technology
and trust that the output produced by the system‟s conversion of speech to
text is of the same quality as the output produced directly as written text
using the keyboard. Our tentative qualitative analysis suggests that this may
not always be the case.
Finally, translators must be willing to change their work habits and
routines. One should not underestimate the fact that working in the oral
modality is a fundamentally different process from working in the written
modality and, intuitively, translators may distrust their own output because
of the difference between spoken and written language output, written
language being generally more varied and precise in choice of terminology.
Hence, despite potential time savings, some translators may not be
prepared to accept the fundamentally different working process required by
SR technology, including the awkward feeling, according to at least one of
Experts exposed 315
the participants, of talking to a machine instead of a person. Spoken

language production intuitively, it seems, involves the presence of a „live‟
recipient.
Professional translators are increasingly dependent on language
technology to be cost-effective in a highly competitive translation market,
and this has spurred our interest not only in what SR technology can do for
the translator, but also in what SR technology does to the translator in
terms of working processes and routines, creativity as well as quality of
translation output.
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Effects of L1 syntax on L2 translation1
Kristian T.H. Jensen, Annette C. Sjørup and Laura Winther Balling
Abstract
We report an eye-tracking experiment in which professional translators were

asked to translate two texts from L1 Danish into L2 English. The texts were
constructed to contain both clauses for which the order of subject and verb
could be transferred directly from Danish to English and clauses where the
order had to be reversed. The experiment revealed that translators gazed
significantly longer at segments for which the word order had to be reversed,
suggesting that L1 syntax is initially applied to the L2, either generally or as
the result of a translation strategy. There was no significant word order effect
on pupil dilation. This difference between the two eye-tracking indicators
could suggest that they measure different processes, that pupil dilation is
delayed or that gaze time does not equal processing effort. Implications for the
study of translation processes and for the use of these indicators are
discussed.
1. Introduction
The translation research centre CRITT, founded by Arnt Lykke Jakobsen, has
carried out a number of experiments coupling eye tracking with translation
process research. These experiments have spanned a wide range of linguistic
phenomena and translation aspects, but the issue of syntactic processing
during translation has received little attention. Here, we begin to explore this
issue.
1
We are grateful to Sharon O’Brien for her constructive comments on a previous draft of
this article.
320 Kristian T.H. Jensen, Annette C. Sjørup & Laura Winther Balling
The inspiration for the experiment was the concept of syntactic priming,
which refers to the influence of previously encountered syntactic features on a
construction currently being processed. Syntactic priming is found both within
a language (see e.g. Hartsuiker & Westenberg 2000; Bock 1986) and between
languages (see e.g. Hartsuiker et al. 2004). We investigated whether even
highly proficient users of L2 (English in this case) such as professional Danish
translators would be syntactically primed to transfer L1 syntax to the L2
translation. We chose to study a phenomenon which is purely syntactic and
where transfer is either obligatory or ungrammatical, namely the order of
subject and verb.
Another concern of the current experiment was to investigate whether
eye tracking is a viable measure of syntactic processing in a translation task.
We considered both total gaze time and pupil dilation.
We analysed the eye-tracking data using mixed-effect regression
models to ensure that any differences observed in the descriptive statistics
were verified by inferential statistics. This allowed us to draw tentative
conclusions for a larger population than the present limited sample.
2. Background
2.1 V2 and subject-verb order in Danish and English
In Danish, the finite verb always occurs as the second constituent of

declarative main clauses (see e.g. Diderichsen 1976, Allan et al. 1995). This
phenomenon is known as verb second or V2 and is a characteristic of most
Germanic languages but not English. Verb second applies whether the subject
of the finite verb is the first constituent of the clause (canonical word order) or
not (non-canonical word order). This means that the canonical word order in
Danish is subject-verb (S-V order), as exemplified by (1). However, when
clauses are introduced by an adverbial or some other fronted constituent,
which may be a word, a phrase or a subordinate clause, the finite verb occurs
before the subject (V-S order), as shown in example (2).
Effects of L1 syntax on L2 translation 321
(1)
Den store stærke mand køber en hund
The big strong man buys a dog
SUBJECT VERB DIRECT OBJECT
(2)
Omvendt foretrækker den feminine kvinde en kat
Conversely prefers the feminine woman a cat
ADV VERB SUBJECT DIRECT OBJECT
English is not a V2 language and consequently word order in English is not

identical to that of Danish. While some Danish clauses have the same order of
subject and finite verb as their English translation equivalents, (Danish S-V
order), in other cases, the word order is reversed (Danish V-S order). This is a
notable difference between Danish and English, and one which Danish L2
learners of English must acquire. Highly proficient L2 users, such as
professional translators, do not generally make errors of subject-verb order in
English. Nonetheless, the different orders of subject and verb in L1 as opposed
to L2 may affect L2 processing and translation from L1 to L2. More
specifically, if L1 syntax is transferred to L2, we may expect that translation of
Danish V-S segments into English S-V segments requires more effort than
translation of Danish S-V segments, which map onto a parallel word order in
English. Crucially, the difference between S-V and V-S order in Danish does
not in itself carry meaning, though the fronting that triggers V-S order changes
the information structure. By looking at the subject-verb segments alone, it is
possible to study the effects of L1 syntax on L2 processing. By investigating
this for professional translators, as in the experiment reported below, we
minimise the risk that any effect of the L1 transfer is an artefact of low
proficiency and unawareness of this difference between Danish and English;
in other words, any effect of this for professional translators is likely to truly
reflect some degree of transfer of L1 syntax into L2, which may be
automatised or the result of some more or less conscious translation strategy.
To the extent that the transfer is automatised, it would correspond to syntactic

priming.
2.2 Eye-tracking indicators and experimental hypotheses
Research shows that there is a strong link between cognitive effort and the
location of the eye’s fixation (Rayner 1998). In reading, the eye remains
fixated on a particular word for as long as the word is being processed (Just &
Carpenter 1980: 330), and Just & Carpenter’s eye-mind assumption posits that
“there is no appreciable lag between what is being fixated and what is being
processed” (1980: 331). Therefore, we assume that observable, quantifiable
gaze data which we can collect with an eye tracker are indicative of
underlying, not directly observable cognitive processes that take place during
a certain task, in this case an L2 translation task. We investigate two eye-
tracking indicators, viz. total gaze time (a) and pupil dilation (b).
(a) Total gaze time

For the purposes of this study, total gaze time is defined as the combined
duration, in milliseconds, of all the fixations on a given area of the screen
during a given task. The justification for using total gaze time as an indicator
of cognitive effort rests on the eye-mind assumption, cf. above. Here, we
assume that an increase in total gaze time is indicative of more cognitive
effort.
It is worth mentioning that when calculating the total gaze time values
we include only fixation activity. Research has shown that the reader is blind
when the eyes perform saccadic movements (Rayner 1998: 378), so inclusion
of this type of gaze activity would challenge the eye-mind assumption.
Processing does indeed still take place during saccadic movements (Rayner
1998: 378), but it is unclear which word or segment is being processed.
Saccadic movements are therefore not included in total gaze time.
(b) Pupil dilation

Based on research by Iqbal et al. (2005), which showed that pupil size reliably
reflects the level of mental workload, O’Brien (2006: 189) suggests that a
relative increase in pupil dilation is synonymous with more cognitive effort

invested in the processing of a translation memory match. We have adopted
O’Brien’s assumption that an increase in pupil dilation is indicative of more
cognitive effort.
On the basis of these assumptions, we hypothesise that the reordering of
subject and verb in translation from L1 Danish to L2 English results in
increased processing effort as evidenced by the total gaze time and pupil
dilation indicators. Confirmation of our hypothesis will require that (a) the
total gaze time dedicated to the processing of the V-S segments is longer than
that dedicated to the processing of the S-V segments, and (b) the pupils are
more dilated during the processing of the V-S segments than during the
processing of the S-V segments.
3. Research design and method
3.1 Participants
Sixteen professional native Danish translators participated in a translation

experiment. All were certified translators and had worked professionally for at
least two years. The texts were on general topics (see Section 3.3 below) and
were not judged to require a high level of translation proficiency. The
translators’ eyes were monitored during a translation task from Danish into
English, i.e. L1 into L2. The participants, who were all volunteers, were seated
at a distance from the monitor of 55 to 80 cm. Data from ten of the translators
were discarded due to poor quality of the eye-tracking data (see Section 3.5
below). The quality assessment was based on Rayner & Sereno’s observation
that the average fixation during reading is 200 to 250 ms (Rayner & Sereno
1994: 58). Consequently, when average fixations were below 175 ms, we took
it to indicate measurement error. Data from participants with average fixation
durations below 175 ms in one or both of the experimental texts were
discarded.
3.2 Task
The participants were tasked with translating two texts (A and B from Danish
into English. Prior to the experimental texts, they were asked to translate a
similar text (Text C) as a warm-up exercise.2 The presentation order of texts A
and B was randomised. There were no time constraints and no translation aids
of any kind.
The participants were asked to translate the texts to their own
professional satisfaction and were allowed to revise the target texts, which
some participants chose to do while others did not.
3.3 Texts
Texts A and B are constructed texts. Using authentic material was deemed
unfeasible because the data had to contain as many S-V and V-S segments as
possible and because these segments also had to meet other requirements (see
below). Altogether, the experimental texts contained 12 S-V segments and 12
V-S segments. The segments were comparable in terms of number of
characters. All verb phrases (VP) were simple while the noun phrases (NP)
were complex. We chose to use complex NPs in order to maximise the chance
of an effect of constituent reordering. The order of the S-V and V-S segments
was alternated throughout the texts. Also, as some researchers have shown that
reading times are longer at sentence-initial and terminal positions, no S-V and
V-S segments were located at these positions (Rayner & Sereno 1994: 73ff,
Gernsbacher 1990: 7).
Although one text scored 33 (easy) and the other 44 (medium) by the
LIX indicator (Bedre Word 2007) of text difficulty (Björnsson 1983), the
statistical analyses showed no difference between the texts in terms of
processing effort invested by the participants. Segments from both texts could
therefore be analysed together.
2
In text C, there were 7 SV and 2 VS segments which is most likely fewer VS segments
than in Danish in general, given the 40 percent non-subject initial clauses in Dutch,
German, Icelandic, and Swedish; see Bohnacker & Rosén (2007). Since there was no
evidence of a priming effect in the experimental texts (but rather a fatigue effect, see
Figure 2), a priming effect between texts is highly unlikely.
The texts were on general topics and included no technical terminology.

Their levels of complexity and the participants’ background as professional
translators were deemed sufficient to ensure that any extended fixation time
would not be caused by unfamiliarity with a word in the Area of Interest
(AOI, see below).
Word frequencies for the Danish segments were extracted from a
combination of two Danish corpora, Korpus90 and Korpus2000 which consist
of 43.6 million words from various sources. For each AOI, the mean
frequency of the content words was used as an independent variable in the
analyses. The mean bigram frequency of all letter pairs in the AOIs was also
extracted from the corpus.
3.4 Equipment and analysis tools
A Tobii 1750 eye tracker was used to collect eye-tracking data and the key-
logging software Translog was used to present the texts. Due to the eye-
tracking equipment’s average accuracy of 0.5 of a degree (corresponding to an
inaccuracy of up to 1 cm), a relatively large font size was used, viz. Times
New Roman 18. Double line spacing was applied to increase accuracy in the
data. The individual text length was approximately 150 words to ensure
sufficient space for both source and target texts without scrolling.
Areas of Interest (AOIs), which are spatially defined regions of the
monitor, were set up around each S-V and V-S segment using the ClearView
software (the analysis software designed for the Tobii eye tracker). ClearView
also calculated the fixations. The fixation filter settings were set to include
gaze samples that fell within a radius of 40 pixels and within a time window
of at least 100 ms.
Since ClearView records pupil dilation but does not contain any pupil
dilation analysis tools, pupil dilation calculations were done in Microsoft
Excel based on exports of the raw eye-tracking data log files.
3.5 Problems with data quality
We see two possible explanations for our high discard percentage. One
explanation could be the equipment’s age. A discard percentage of 62.5 (data
from ten out of 16 participants had to be excluded) could indicate technical
problems as this figure is somewhat higher than in previous experiments
carried out with the same piece of equipment (e.g. Pavlović & Jensen 2009;
Jensen, in preparation). The second possible explanation could relate to the
participant’s distance from the monitor. Experiments with participants sitting
at a distance of more than 55 to 60 cm generally resulted in lower eye-tracking
data quality based on the average fixation duration criterion previously
mentioned. In future experiments, data quality could probably be improved by
paying more attention to this parameter.
As it is neither possible nor desirable to use head fixation in this type of
experiment, it is extremely difficult to ensure that the participants do not move
further away from the monitor during the experiment. The fact that non-touch
typists look away from the monitor more may also cause drift, which in turn
can lead to poor data quality. This is of course a general issue for all
experiments combining typing and eye tracking and does not offer an
explanation for the very high discard percentage in this specific experiment.
4. Results
4.1 Statistical methods
The data were analysed using linear mixed-effects regression models (Bates et
al. 2008) in the R environment for statistical computing (R Development Core
Team 2008). These models are mixed in the sense that they include both
random effects and fixed-effect factors and covariates. The random effects are
effects of sampled variables which are not repeatable; here, we include
random intercepts for participant and AOI, which essentially model the
random variation between the participants and the AOIs. Fixed factors and
covariates are variables which are repeatable; in our case, the most important
fixed effect is for the factor Word Order with the levels S-V and V-S. An
advantage of using this type of analysis is that it is also possible to include as

fixed effects a number of more control-oriented variables. The regression
analyses allow statistical control of variables which are difficult to control
experimentally, e.g. frequency and length, as well as of variables relating to
context which cannot be controlled experimentally, such as position of AOI in
text. The inclusion of these variables also increases the information yielded by
the experiment compared to traditional factorial methods.
We performed the analyses as follows. First, we fitted a regression
model which included all potentially relevant variables as predictors. The
dependent variable gaze time as well as several of the independent variables
were logarithmically transformed in order to reduce skewness. Non-significant
predictors were then removed in a backwards stepwise fashion. We removed
outliers by filtering out data points whose residuals were more than 2.5
standard deviations from the mean (following, for instance, Crawley 2002), to
reach the model for total gaze time summarised in Table 1; 2.9 % of our data
points were removed in this way. The same procedure was applied in the
analysis of the pupil dilation data but revealed very little of interest, as
discussed below.
In Table 1, the independent variables are listed in the leftmost column
and their estimated effect in the second column. The next four columns are
based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, which constructs
multiple samples of the parameters of the model based on the data and the
given model. The MCMC mean is the estimate of the effect size based on the
MCMC samples, and the HPD (highest posterior density) lower and upper are
credible intervals within which 95 % of the MCMC estimates for the given
parameter lie. The HPD intervals correspond to standard 95 % confidence
intervals but provide superior accuracy. Similarly, the MCMC-based p-value
in the fifth column is more appropriate than the p-value based on the t-
distribution, which is shown in the rightmost column (see Baayen 2008, for
details).
Table 1. Summary of regression model for total gaze time using contrast coding for
the factor Word Order with S-V as the reference level. The model also included
crossed random effects for AOI (s.d. estimated at 0.1810) and Participant (s.d.
estimated at 0.3636). The residual standard error of the model was estimated at
0.4043.
Estimate MCMC HPD HPD p p (t)
mean lower upper (MCMC)
Intercept 12.7103 12.6912 7.0172 17.9804 0.0002 0.0002
Word order: V-S 0.2889 0.2886 0.0769 0.4927 0.0078 0.0217
Position of AOI 0.0099 0.0098 0.0045 0.0154 0.0010 0.0020
Word repetition -0.5120 -0.5054 -0.8389 -0.1748 0.0036 0.0093
Number of characters 0.0569 0.0564 0.0301 0.0837 0.0004 0.0004
Log mean content word -3.5105 -3.4902 -6.4689 -0.4364 0.0252 0.0534
freq (linear)
Log mean content word 0.4499 0.4468 0.0425 0.8594 0.0338 0.0672
freq (quadratic)
As described above, we focused on two eye-tracking indicators, namely total

gaze time and pupil dilation. The total gaze time was highly correlated with
the number of fixations in the same AOI (R2 = 0.84). We chose to analyse the
total gaze time because this variable is graded and more informative, but the
results were very similar when the number of fixations were analysed.
However, the high correlation between the two variables means that it is
unclear exactly which indicator accounts for which share of the variance, and
the total gaze time measure analysed should probably be considered an
aggregate measure of both gaze time and number of fixations.
4.2 Total gaze time results
The main hypothesis of the experiment was that V-S segments would require
more cognitive effort than S-V segments. Mean total gaze time per character
was 468 ms for the S-V segments and 576 ms for the V-S segments,
representing a 23.1 % increase. The analysis of the total gaze time summarised
in Table 1 clearly confirms that participants looked significantly longer at
segments with V-S order, which has to be reversed for translation into English,
than at segments with S-V order, for which the Danish word order can be
retained in the English translation. In Table 1, the coefficient for “Word order:
V-S” represents the difference to “Word Order: S-V” which is mapped to the
intercept. The value for “Word order: V-S” is positive, representing longer
gaze time, and the associated MCMC-based p-value is low (p = 0.0078),
indicating a high likelihood that the difference observed in the sample
generalises to the relevant population of translators. The difference between
the word orders is illustrated in Figure 1. This is a partial effects plot showing
the difference between the two word orders while all other significant
variables are held constant at their medians. In other words, Figure 1 shows
the difference between S-V and V-S order, all other things being equal.
Figure 1: Partial effect of word order
Although the difference between S-V and V-S order is the focus of the
experiment, the regression model summarised in Table 1 also includes other
covariates, which both serve the purpose of statistical control of variables
which could otherwise be confounding and provide information about the gaze
behaviour of our participants while they translate. These variables are listed in
Table 1 and illustrated in Figure 2. The variables in the top row have to do
with the context in which each relevant segment occurs: Position is the word
number of the first word of the relevant segment; this has significant
inhibitory effect such that gaze time increased for later parts of each text (p =
0.001). This effect could be caused by fatigue or the fact that more
information has been presented later in the text, which could result in longer
gaze times. The top right panel of Figure 2 shows the effect of word repetition.
A number of words occurred several times in each text; in order to control
this, we included a variable that indexed the mean number of times each word
in the AOIs had been encountered previously in the same text. The plot shows
that word repetition resulted in shorter gaze times, corresponding to a
repetition priming effect for the words in question (p = 0.0036).
Figure 2: Partial effects of position of AOI, mean number of word repetitions, length
in characters, and mean frequency of content words
The bottom panels of Figure 2 show effects of item characteristics. The effect
of the number of characters is shown in the bottom left panel: as expected,
participants gazed significantly longer at longer AOIs (p = 0.0004). The
bottom right plot shows that AOIs that contained content words of higher
frequency were associated with shorter gaze times, though the effect levelled
off for high frequencies, as indicated by the significant quadratic effect of
frequency. The frequency effect is the most marginal effect in the regression
analysis, a finding which would be surprising for reading but probably less
surprising for translation where many other factors are at play. Mean bigram
frequency had no significant effect.
4.3 Pupil dilation results
Assuming that pupil dilation is reflective of cognitive processing, in line with

the eye-mind assumption, we would expect the participants’ pupils to be more
dilated during processing of V-S segments compared to processing of S-V
segments. During the processing of the S-V segments, our participants’ mean
pupil dilation was 3.821 mm, while the mean pupil dilation was 3.807 mm
when processing the V-S segments, representing a 0.4 percent decrease in
pupil dilation. This difference was not significant. No other variables were
significant in the pupil dilation analysis except AOI position.
5. Discussion and conclusion
The experiment showed that translators gazed significantly longer at V-S than
at S-V segments when translating from L1 Danish into L2 English. There was
no significant difference in pupil dilation between the two types of
constructions. These findings contrast with our expectation that the two
indicators would show the same pattern of increased processing effort for V-S
as opposed to S-V segments. In the following, we discuss possible reasons for
this difference between the indicators and the resulting different
interpretations of the measures and results.
One tempting explanation is that total gaze time and pupil dilation are
indicative of different cognitive processes. Several processes occupy the
cognitive capacity of the translator during translation, including

morphological, lexical, semantic, syntactic, and coordinative processing. It is
outside the scope of this paper to uncover if our indicators in fact reflect
different types of processing effort, and if so, which indicator illustrates which
process. However, assuming that the gaze time indicator is representative of
cognitive effort, our results could indicate that gaze time reflects syntactic
processing, while it is less clear which process is reflected in pupil dilation.
The present experiment does not show pupil dilation to be a viable measure of
syntactic processing in translation, but further research is required to clarify
this.
A second explanation relates to possible delays in pupil dilation
reaction: For each of our AOIs, the mean pupil dilation is calculated only on
the basis of fixations that fall within the boundaries of the AOI. However,
pupil dilation latencies have been observed during reading. The physiological
reaction to increased cognitive effort invested in a task “begins with a delay of
300-500 milliseconds” (Hyönä et al. 1995: 605), which means that the
participant’s gaze may already have exited the AOI in question. If this is
indeed the case, and assuming that reading for translation is a purely linear
task, our mean pupil dilation values may be erroneous in that they include up
to 300 ms irrelevant pupil activity, and exclude up to 300 ms relevant pupil
activity. To correctly calculate the S-V and V-S segments’ mean pupil dilation
values, new “pupil AOIs” that take this delay into account would have to be
defined. However, defining the boundaries of the new AOIs accurately would
be highly problematic for at least two reasons. Firstly, reading during
translation is not a linear process. Secondly, pupil dilation latencies would
most likely vary between participants, necessitating a baseline pupil dilation
latency score for each participant.
A third possible explanation is that gaze time is an indicator of
processing time rather than processing difficulty. It could be that the
reordering of subject and verb simply takes more time, without necessarily
requiring increased cognitive effort. Put differently, the task of moving the
noun phrase up in front of the verb phrase (or the verb phrase back behind the
noun phrase) may very well be significantly more time-consuming than when
no reordering is required. However, this does not have to mean that the
processing of V-S segments impose heavier demands on cognitive capacities,
especially for professional translators who might automatise this shift to some
extent. This would explain why the pupil dilation indicator shows no evidence
of increased cognitive effort associated with the V-S segments compared to
the S-V segments. This tentative explanation obviously challenges the general
assumption that increased time consumption reflects an increased amount of
cognitive effort. This challenge to the assumed relation between time
consumption and cognitive effort presupposes that our pupil dilation
measurements are valid and that pupil dilation reflects cognitive effort
invested in syntactic processing but, as discussed above, this is not necessarily
the case.
Assuming that the total gaze time does in fact reflect processing effort,
we may understand the significant difference between processing of S-V and
V-S segments in two ways. One possibility is to understand it in terms of
automatic transfer of L1 syntax to all types of L2 processing, in accordance
with the view that L2 processing is heavily influenced by L1 structure (e.g.
MacWhinney 2005; Frenck-Mestre & Pynte 1997) and with evidence of
syntactic priming between languages (Hartsuiker et al. 2004). However, the
fact that the L1 syntactic structure is present for the translator in the shape of
the source text makes it difficult to draw conclusions, based on this
experiment, about the influence of L1 on L2 processing more generally. A
reading experiment in L2 comparing segments that are parallel to L1 with
those that are not could help clarify this.
A further interesting investigation of the findings of the current
experiment would be a reading experiment in L1 that could establish whether
differences in gaze time between S-V and V-S are limited to translation tasks
like the present.
Another possibility is that the S-V vs. V-S difference is the result of a
more or less conscious translation strategy. Since the subject-verb order of
many Danish clauses may be directly transferred to English, it may be that
such transfer is the initial strategy in all cases. The fact that such transfer is
correct for clauses with unmarked, canonical word order may support this
explanation. On the other hand, the fact that the participants were professional
translators and thus highly skilled users of the L2 may make it unlikely that
they apply such a relatively crude strategy, which is inappropriate in a number
of cases.
Despite the low number of participants, our experiment showed a
significant effect of word order on gaze time. Moreover, the participants were
professional translators for whom the change of word order from L1 to L2
could be assumed to be trivial. The significance of the effect in spite of these
two facts suggests that the reordering of constituents is an important element
of the translation process. By implication, constituents seem to function as
cognitive units in translation (cf. also Dragsted 2004). We would expect this to
generalise beyond the current language pair of L1 Danish and L2 English and
beyond the current relatively small sample.
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Appendix
Text A
Nogle vil påstå, at mænd og kvinder taler forskellige sprog. Hvis en mand i et
parforhold siger, at han ikke ønsker at tale om sine problemer, føler den
typiske kvinde, at hun bliver udelukket fra hans verden. Hvis kvinden siger til
ham, at hun ikke ønsker at snakke om problemerne, tror de fleste mænd, at
hun ikke har behov for at tale om dem. Disse misforståelser giver anledning til
skænderier. Når store skænderier opstår, reagerer kvinder og mænd også
forskelligt. Ny forskning viser, at mange kvinder græder, når de er vrede. I
disse situationer vælger skræmte mænd at flygte, og de kan føle sig
hjælpeløse. I modsætning til den grædende kvinde bruger den vrede mand
hårde ord. På trods af disse forskellige reaktioner formår de fleste mænd og
kvinder at leve fredeligt sammen, og vi kan jo nok ikke leve uden hinanden.
Text B
I mange hjem finder man et kæledyr, og de fleste mennesker foretrækker enten

hund eller kat. Indtil videre slår den bløde hundehvalp den kære killing i
kapløbet om at være Danmarks mest populære kæledyr. Mens hundens
loyalitet forklarer dens store popularitet, elsker de talrige katteejere kattens
selvstændighed. Mens den almindelige katteejer synes, at en hund er for
uselvstændig og beskidt, opfatter mange hundeejere katte som dovne og
upersonlige. Mange kæledyrsejere vælger et kæledyr, der afspejler deres egen
personlighed. Når den store stærke mand køber en stor stærk hund, forstærker
hundens træk hundeejerens ego. Omvendt foretrækker den feminine kvinde tit
den smukke og elegante kat. Hunden og katten enes normalt uden problemer,
hvis de er vant til hinanden. Ofte toppes hundeejeren og katteejeren mere end
hunden og katten.
Part IV
PRECISION,
STRATEGIES AND
QUALITY
ASSESSMENT
Translation preferences in legal translation:
lawyers and professional translators compared
Dorrit Faber and Mette Hjort-Pedersen
Abstract
Translation theorists have long discussed whether elements of meaning can

be added or left out in legal translation. Adding elements would involve
explicitation, leaving out elements would involve implicitation. Some
theorists advocate fidelity and near-literalness, others that legal
translations should be linguistically adapted to cater for the information
needs of target-language readers with less prior knowledge. This article
seeks to explore whether two groups of participants in the legal discourse
community, i.e. lawyers and professional translators, approach the question
of explicitation and implicitation similarly or whether different preferences
can be observed for the two groups. The data on which the analysis is
based consist of eight translations of an English pre-marital contract
produced by four lawyers and four translators.
1. Introduction
Commenting on the nature of translation, Jakobsen (1993: 73) remarks:

Linguistic, cultural and text-conventional requirements make it inevitable that
meaning is sometimes specified, sometimes generalised, sometimes added,
sometimes omitted, sometimes expressed metaphorically rather than concretely,
etc.
However, in the face of often major differences in legal systems and

drafting principles that call for different linguistic manoeuvres to overcome
cultural bumps, translators have long discussed whether it is a feasible
and/or advisable strategy to add or leave out elements of meaning in legal
translation. Because of the special performative function of legal texts, i.e.
their ability under proper conditions to create legal rights and obligations,
some translation theorists and lawyers have tended to see it as extremely
340 Dorrit Faber and Mette Hjort-Pedersen
important that the legal translator observes the notion of fidelity to the
source text (ST), cf. e.g. Šarčević (1997: 16):
Legal translators have traditionally been bound by the principle of fidelity.
Convinced that the main goal of legal translation is to reproduce the content of
the source text as accurately as possible, both lawyers and linguists agreed that
legal texts had to be translated literally. For the sake of preserving the letter of
the law, the main guideline for legal translation was fidelity to the source text.
and Rayar (1988: 542):

The task of the legal translator is to remain true to the ST and to approximate it
as closely as possible with his translation.
Others, e.g. Šarčević (1997), Engberg (2002) and Alcaraz and Hughes
(2002), advocate a different strategy for the translation of legal texts,
namely that of taking both the purpose of the translation and the cultural
expectations of the target-language reader into consideration by producing
“a translation that provides connotative as well as denotative parity with its
original” (Alcaraz and Hughes 2002: 178). Here the focus is on catering for
information needs of the target-text (TT) reader rather than solely on
conveying the explicit content of the ST. This is where explicitations and
implicitations may be relevant, see Section 5.
To our knowledge, these very different „guidelines‟ for legal
translation, equating fidelity with (near) literalness on the one hand and
catering for information needs of the TT reader on the other, have not been
supported by empirical data showing what translators do in real life when
they translate legal texts or what the attitude to these different viewpoints
are among lawyers today.
In a Danish legal context, translations to and from English are, we
believe, mostly produced by professional translators, sometimes in
collaboration with lawyers. But occasionally Danish lawyers make their
own legal translations. Consequently, we are interested in examining
whether professional translators and lawyer translators approach the
question of fidelity and use of explicitation and implicitation in legal
translation similarly or differently. We will do so by analysing translations
of the same text produced by four lawyers and four professional translators.
Legal translation: lawyers and professional translators compared 341
2. Research questions
We wish to discuss three issues:

1. Do the two groups use explicitations and implicitations in their
translations and if so, what types? Can any differences between the two
groups be observed?
2. Is it possible to point to reasons for the choice of explicitations vs.
implicitations? Besides the quantitative information about the use, if
any, of explicitations and implicitations, we also wish to gather
qualitative information about the potential specific purposes for which
they are used, while keeping in mind that it is not possible to say
anything with any certainty without access to process data, cf. Englund
Dimitrova (2005).
3. Can differences be observed for the two groups not only in number but
also in the type of implications that follow from the individual
operations, i.e., what level of risk taking is undertaken in connection
with the operations?
3. Background and hypothesis
In the legal discourse community, the communication that lawyers engage

in when they brief their clients on a legal matter or when they draft
contracts on their clients‟ behalf will represent instances of descriptive use
of language in relevance theoretic terms.1 On the other hand, translations of
lawyer communication into another language produced by professional
translators will in most cases be instances of interpretive use of language.
Gutt (1990: 146) defines the two concepts as follows:
[T]here are two fundamentally distinct ways in which utterances and
representations more generally can be used: they can be used descriptively, that
is, as true descriptions of some state of affairs, and they can be used
interpretively; i.e. by virtue of their resemblance with some other representation.
We assume that the linguistic choices made by these two groups of

communicators will be determined by whether their work involves using
language descriptively or interpretively. Unlike descriptive use of language,
1
For an outline of relevance theory, see e.g. Blakemore (1995).
interpretive language use involves meaning construction processes without

necessarily committing oneself to the truth value of the communication. So
the type of risk taking involved in the two kinds of language use differs.2
These different approaches to language production could also be
described as differences in the type of domain knowledge that is
proceduralised, i.e. “where the declarative knowledge of the domain, what
is known about the task, is converted into production rules, which are like
conditional (if–then) statements that specify what problem resolution
methods should be applied when certain patterns of events are recognised
in a task” (Shreve 2006: 35). Thus, the lawyer experts would have
proceduralised their knowledge of how to draft or explain legal rules,
whereas legal translators would have proceduralised their knowledge of
how to convey, on an interlingual basis, the content of lawyers‟ discourse.
Our hypothesis is that the different expert roles in the legal discourse
community of the two groups are reflected in different approaches to text
production and risk taking, and therefore in the number and nature of the
two groups‟ use of explicitations and implicitations as strategies in their
translation of a legal text.
4. Data and informants
The data on which the present analysis is based have kindly been made
available to us by a former MA student of LSP translation at the
Copenhagen Business School who, as part of her MA thesis, asked four
lawyers and four professional translators to translate parts of an English
pre-marital contract into Danish (Fischer 2008). Her purpose was different
from ours, in that she was not focusing on explicitation and implicitation
but rather on the two groups‟ preferences for source- and target-language
orientation. The identity of the participants is of course not revealed in the
thesis, but their names are known to us. The lawyers are all employed at a
major Copenhagen-based law firm while the professional translators have
worked in this capacity in various contexts for a number of years. Both
groups of translators have Danish as their mother tongue, and both groups
are familiar with Danish legal texts and their characteristic features. In the
2
For risk taking in translation, see Pym (2005).
translation process all of them had access to dictionaries and the Internet.
They had as much time as they needed to complete the task. They were
given a translation brief specifying the purpose of the translation as that of
informing a client of the contents of the pre-marital contract in view of her
intended marriage in England.
The data consist of translated texts and a number of prospective and
retrospective questions relating to the informants‟ translation process, e.g.
prospective questions about their initial choice of translation strategy, and
retrospective questions about elements that they found difficult to convey
in the translation. Thus the data are mainly product data but with some
information about how the informants experienced their own understanding
and translation process.
5. Explicitation and implicitation explored
The so-called explicitation hypothesis, first put forward by Blum-Kulka

(1986), predicts that translations will always be longer than originals,
irrespective of language, genre and register. In a later study, Klaudy and
Károly (2005) provide evidence for what they refer to as the “asymmetry
hypothesis” according to which, where there is a choice, translators tend to
prefer explicitation as a strategy and fail to perform implicitation when they
move in the opposite translation direction. Based on Perego (2003: 73),
Klaudy and Károly (2005: 15), and Hjort-Pedersen and Faber (in press), we
define explicitation and implicitation as follows.
Explicitation is of two types: addition and specification.
Addition (A) is quantitative in nature, and involves the inclusion in
the TT of extra lexical items that either add or repeat meaningful
elements.
Specification (S) is qualitative, i.e. it adds meaning(s) by using
lexical elements that are semantically more informative.
Similarly, we consider implicitation to be of two kinds:
Reduction (R), which involves leaving out meaningful ST lexical
elements in the TT.
Generalisation (G), which involves using TL lexical elements that

are semantically less specific than the ST lexical elements.
Where there are differences, for instance, in legal concepts in the source
and target cultures – in our case differences between the legal systems of
England and Denmark – and if the TT reader is not likely to have the same
encyclopaedic knowledge as the ST reader, the translator will have to make
a decision:
If the target reader is to have available (some of) the same contextual
assumptions that the ST reader has or had, the translator may
explicitate some of the implicatures of the legal concepts specifically
and of the ST generally. Such explicitation could be referred to as
“pragmatic” explicitation (Klaudy 1998: 83).
However, if the translator decides in view of the purpose of the
translation that the TT reader will be better off without being given
access to the same kind of contextual assumptions as the ST reader,
the translator might opt for a literal translation or might leave out
meaningful lexical elements, i.e. implicitate information.
To illustrate these options with an example that is relevant in our data we
will consider the English concept of “pre-marital contract”. A similar
concept ægtepagt is found in the Danish system too, but the two legal
systems differ in terms of the legal consequences of entering into such an
agreement. Thus, the English pre-marital contract is not binding on the
court in case of a later conflict, e.g. in divorce proceedings, which means
that the court could divide the assets of the couple in a way that differs
from the stipulations of the agreement. However, in the Danish system such
an agreement is binding and must in the overwhelming majority of cases be
observed by the court in case of a divorce. In relevance theoretic terms this
information about the legal consequences is implicated, as opposed to the
explicated information that it is a contract made before marriage. This
could be formalised as follows:
Pre-marital contract
Explicit information: a contract entered into before a marriage.
Implicated (encyclopaedic) information: This agreement is not binding
(under English law).
Ægtepagt
Explicit information: a marriage contract
Implicated (encyclopaedic) information: the contract can be made before or
after the wedding, and it is binding (under Danish law).
Faced with the translation of the term „pre-marital contract‟ into Danish the
translator has to make a choice, taking into consideration of course the
purpose of the translation of the text in question. One option available to
the translator is the following:
1. en ægtepagt indgået inden ægteskabet (ikke-bindende efter engelsk ret)
(“a marriage contract entered into before the marriage (not binding under
English law)”). This represents an explicitation of one implied
consequence, i.e., an implicature in relevance-theoretic terms, of the non-
binding nature of the agreement.
Another option might simply be:
2. en ægtepagt (“a marriage contract”). Here the pre-marital aspect is
implicitated and no implicatures are made explicit.
A third option might be:
3. en før-ægteskabelig kontrakt (“a pre-marital contract”). In this case there
is no explicitation of implied legal consequences and no implicitation of the
time when the contract is entered into (i.e., before or after the marriage,
which in a Danish context is legally less relevant).
6. Analysis
One of the prospective questions that was put to the participants before
they translated the text deals with the issue of fidelity and near-literalness;
both lawyers and translators were asked about their attitude to source- and
target-language bias in legal translation. One of the lawyers responded in
the following way:
I would prefer a very close translation for instance if the text is to be used in
court, or if it’s a certified translation. Alternatively, if the text is to be available
in both English and Danish, I would be less concerned with the fidelity or the
closeness of the translation, as it would typically contain a stipulation like “the
English version shall prevail.” [Our translation]
And similarly, one of the translators replies that:

As far as possible I would have the translation be very close to the source text,
as the document is to be used in England and is about English law, but I would
as far as possible adapt the text to the Danish drafting style. [Our translation]
This would seem to indicate that the use of explicitation and implicitation
would be fairly infrequent with our text, but a detailed analysis of the ST
and TTs shows that this is in fact not the case. The text comprises two
clauses, 4.1 and 4.4 of the pre-marital contract. Table 1 summarises the
results of explicitations and implicitations made by the two groups of
translators.
Table 1. Explicitation and implicitation scores (L = lawyer; T = translator;
A = addition; S = specification; G = generalisation; R = reduction)
4.1 L1 L2 L3 L4 T1 T2 T3 T4
Explicitation A: 9 A: 2 A: 7
A: 5 A: 2A: 4 A: 5 A: 7
S: 1 S: 1 S: 2
S:1 S: 2S: 3 S: 1 S: 1
= 10 =3 =9 =6 =4 =7 =6 =8
Implicitation G: 1 R: 4 G: 1
G :2 G: 1R: 1 R: 1 R: 1
R: 3 G: 1 G: 1
=5 =2 =2
Total 4.1 10 + 1 3 + 4 9 + 1 6 + 5 4+1 7+2 6+2 8+1
4.4 L1 L2 L3 L4 T1 T2 T3 T4
Explicitation A: 4 A: 5 A: 2 A: 3 A: 2 A: 3 A: 3 A: 4
S: 2 S: 2 S: 2
=6 =7 =4
Implicitation R: 2 R: 2 R: 2 R: 5 G: 1 R: 1 G: 1 G: 1
Total 4.4 6 +2 7+ 2 4+2 3+5 2+1 3+1 3+1 4+1
Averages Lawyers Translators
Explicitations 12 9.25
Implicitations 5.5 2.5
Total averages 17.5 11.75
(expl. + impl.)
6.1 Scores and types
Table 1 shows that both groups engage in explicitation and implicitation

operations. In actual figures, the explicitation and implicitation scores for
the lawyer group are 48 and 22, respectively. On the translator side, the
numbers are 37 and 10. For both groups the highest score is found with
addition. The lawyers are more prone to using reductions, with Lawyer 2
and Lawyer 4 having the highest scores in this category. This relatively
limited sample of data does not allow any clear-cut conclusions, but it
seems that there is a tendency towards a higher degree of explicitation and
implicitation manoeuvres in the lawyer group, who show a total average of
17.5 as against the translators‟ 11.75.
6.2 Explicitation and implicitation purposes
6.2.1 Coping with differences in drafting style preferences

Our analyses below show that drafting style preferences may be one reason
for the choice of either explicitation in the form of addition or implicitation
in the form of reduction.
As is well known, common-law based contracts are generally more
explicit in their wording than civil-law based contracts. To quote one of the
lawyers from the prospective interviews [our translation]:
English lawyers are very fond of using long sentences and many insertions and
embedded sentences. (Lawyer 3)
This is seen as a problem in terms of producing a Danish TT. Lawyer 3

continues:
But that would result in a somewhat nonsensical Danish text, i.e., if you just
transfer the text structure of the English source text.
A response to this difference between the preferred drafting styles is to

divide the long sentences into two or more in the Danish TT or to leave out
specifying expressions from the English text. Where shorter sentences are
preferred in the target language, either full stops are inserted or two
conjoined main sentences are created out of one by the use of „and‟. This
transfer operation involves addition through the repetition of the sentence
subject, or the repetition of various other lexical elements in the sentence.
In our data two lawyers and two translators make this shift of text structure
in their TTs.
Example 1 illustrates explicitation in connection with drafting style
preferences, and the elements underlined represent the additions due to the
shift in text structure and the resulting repetition of lexical elements.
Explicitations and implicitations in the examples below that cannot be
categorised as drafting style preferences will not be discussed here.
Example 1
Source text Lawyer 1 Back-translation
4.1 Each of the parties has 4.1 Hver af parterne har 4.1 Each of the parties has
acquired his or her separate erhvervet deres respektive acquired their respective
property independently of aktiver uafhængigt af og assets independently of and
and without any uden økonomisk bidrag fra without financial
contribution from the other den anden part. contribution from the other
and wishes to retain his or party.
her separate property,
whether owned now or Parterne (A) ønsker hver The parties wish both of
acquired later, free from især at bevare den fulde them to retain the full
any claim of the other by ejendomsret til deres ownership of their
virtue of the Marriage respektive aktiver (særeje), respective assets (separate
unless otherwise provided uagtet om aktiverne (A) er property), whether or not
for by this deed or in a erhvervet på nuværende the assets have been
supplemental deed tidspunkt eller erhverves acquired now or are
executed by them. senere. acquired later.
Ingen part (A) kan således Neither party can thus by

som følge af ægteskabet virtue of the marriage
opnå ejendomsret til den acquire the ownership of
andens aktiver (A), the assets of the other
medmindre andet fremgår party, unless otherwise
af denne ægtepagt eller provided for by this marital
aftales i et senere tillæg contract or agreed in a later
hertil. supplement hereto.
Instances of implicitation which may be caused by Danish drafting style

preferences can also be found.
Example 2 illustrates instances of reduction, the TT leaving out
qualifying postmodifying phrases that appear in the ST. Such phrases
exemplify the higher degree of explicitness used in English legal
style/contracts than in Danish. The underlined entities focus on the relevant
parts of the text.
By using a concept found in Danish law, fuldstændigt særeje („fully
separate property‟), Lawyer 2 implicates the meaningful qualifying
complement „free from any claim of the other‟. Lawyer 4 simply leaves out
the participles that specify how this property came to be the property of the
relevant party, so where the ST makes explicit both the aspect of
possession and the aspect of time, the TT contains only an expression of
time. In both cases, the translating lawyer‟s assumption might be that the
Danish target reader would be able to enrich the Danish TT sufficiently, so

as to be able to infer the same content as was explicit in the ST.
Example 2
4.1 Each of the parties has 4.1: Hver Part har […] og 4.1: Each Party has […],
[…] and wishes to retain hver Part ønsker at dennes and each Party wishes that
his or her separate property, respektive formue, his or her respective
erhvervet før eller efter
whether owned now or property, acquired before
indgåelse af ægteskab, skal
acquired later, free from være fuldstændigt særeje or after the contraction of
any claim of the other by (R) marriage, shall be [his or
virtue of the Marriage her] fully separate property
Lawyer 4
4.1 […] wishes to retain his 4.1 Parterne afskærer sig 4.1 The parties are
or her separate property, fra med henvisning til estopped from, by virtue of
whether owned now or ægteskabet at gøre krav the marriage, making
gældende mod den anden
acquired later claims on the other party‟s
parts (R) nuværende og
fremtidige ejendom present and future property
Another type of explicitness which is characteristic of English legal

drafting conventions is the listing of possible future scenarios, e.g. by using
several near-synonymous verbal expressions, cf. Example 3.
Example 3
4.4. Neither party shall make 4.4: Ingen af Parterne kan 4.4 Neither Party may
any claim […] and each of them gøre krav […] og hver make any claim […]
agrees to release all rights and Part frafalder and each Party
not to pursue claims in respect uigenkaldeligt enhver irrevocably releases any
of any rights which he or she rettighed en Part måtte rights a Party may
might acquire by reason of the erhverve (R) som følge af acquire by virtue of the
Marriage over the property of ægteskabet over den anden marriage over the other
the other […] Parts fuldstændige særeje Party‟s fully separate
[…] property, […]
Here the English ST is characterised by a high degree of explicitness in that

it employs two verbal phrases to express the proposition that each party
must give up any rights to the other party‟s property. Lawyer 2 chooses to
condense the explicitness of the ST into one verbal act:
each of them agrees to release all rights
and not to pursue claims in respect of any rights
becomes
frafalder uigenkaldeligt enhver rettighed („releases irrevocably any

right‟)
It is only the lawyer group that engages in this kind of implicitation. In

their case we find a total of five occurrences, out of which Lawyers 2 and 4
are responsible for two each, and Lawyer 1, a single occurrence. The
translators‟ TTs, on the other hand, do not show any examples of this kind
of implicitation based on reduction. Instead their translational pattern is to
reproduce the individual ST lexical elements in connection with the
postmodifying phrases (Example 4).
Example 4
Source text Translator 1 Back-translation
4.1 […] separate property, 4.1 […] særeje, hvad enten 4.1 […] separate property
whether owned now or det er i vedkommendes whether it is in the
acquired later, free from besiddelse nu eller possession of the person in
any claim of the other erhverves senere, uden question now or is acquired
noget som helst krav fra later, free from any claim
den anden part from the other party
6.2.2 Coping with differences in legal concepts

Problems connected with conveying the meaning of culture-bound legal
concepts seem to be another reason for opting for explicitation and
implicitation. The ST contains three legal concepts, i.e. „deed‟, „separate
property‟ and „beneficial ownership‟.
The handling of translations of legal concepts is touched upon in the
lawyer and translator interviews, and both groups admit to having been
faced with problems here.
Focusing on the purpose of the translation, lawyer 2 comments that
it would be okay to insert explanatory footnotes, if there is something that
doesn’t make sense under Danish law. One might insert the English term and
then add a Danish explanation. I actually considered that, but then I thought
that the translation is only to be used in connection with a briefing of this client.
[Our translation]
Contrary to what might have been expected in view of the cultural

differences that might require explanations to someone unfamiliar with the
legal system, addition is only seen once in one of the lawyer translations in
connection with „separate property‟.
There is no indication in the interviews of what the translators
contemplated in connection with the translation of these legal concepts.
Nor do their TTs show any manifestations of addition in connection with
the translation of the legal concepts.
The explicitation strategy of specification and the implicitation
strategy of generalisation, on the other hand, are used by both groups, albeit
in different ways. Example 5 illustrates a case in point. The focus here is on
the legal concept „deed‟:
Example 5
4.1 […] unless otherwise […] medmindre andet […] unless otherwise
provided for by this deed or følger af denne ægtepagt provided for by this
in a supplemental deed (S) eller aftales i et senere marriage contract or is
executed by them. tillæg hertil agreed in a later
supplement hereto.
Translator 1
[…] medmindre andet er [...] unless otherwise
angivet i dette dokument provided for by this
(G) eller i et supplerende document or in a
dokument (G) udfærdiget supplemental document
af parterne. executed by the parties.
The term „deed‟ in its legal meaning covers certain special contracts in
English law. By choosing ægtepagt as a translation, Lawyer 1, opts for a
lexical element that is semantically more informative than the source term.
Or in other words: Lawyer 1 chooses a specification of which type of
„deed‟ the text is concerned with. This solution is seen in three of the
lawyer translations.
Translator 1, on the other hand, chooses a generalisation by
translating „deed‟ as dokument. Thus, she chooses a term that is
semantically less specific than the ST lexical element, in that the meaning
of dokument is merely a piece of paper that gives information, proof or
support of something else. This solution is opted for by three of the
translators.
If we consider what is linguistically encoded, reference assignment

would not present any problems to the TT reader whether the term
ægtepagt or the term dokument is chosen. However, some information is
lost, because both groups apply an impoverishment strategy with respect to
the contextual information that they end up making accessible to the
Danish TT reader. The ST term „deed‟ implies information to the effect that
this is a contract used in special contexts and for special purposes. Both
groups seem to choose solutions that indicate that they do not consider this
particular contextual information sufficiently relevant to the target reader to
justify the extra processing cost necessary in order for the TT reader to be
able to make the exact same kind of enrichment as the original ST reader.
But the type of strategy differs. By selecting the term ægtepagt, three of the
lawyers choose a specification that “makes sense” under Danish law, as
Lawyer 2 puts it, in this particular linguistic context. By contrast, three of
the translators opt for a generalisation, i.e. dokument, that would “make
sense” in all sorts of contexts. The difference between the two groups could
thus be described as a question of choosing specificity versus
underspecificity.
With respect to the other two legal concepts, lawyers and translators
again choose different strategies. Thus, for „beneficial ownership‟ the
preferred strategy of all four lawyers is reduction, whereas there is a mix of
strategies for the translators. „Separate property‟ presents a mixed picture in
the lawyer group with two lawyers using additions, one using specification
and one using reduction, whereas all four translators here agree on using
specifications (possibly because that is in accordance with the relevant
dictionary entry). It therefore seems that the two groups differ in their
perception of what is relevant to the specified target reader.
6.3 Narrowing of legal conceptual content

A number of interlingual enrichments appear in both lawyers‟ and
translators‟ TTs, but the results of the enrichments of the two groups differ.
We assume that these enrichments reflect the ST reader‟s own
pragmatic understanding of the source utterances, cf. Falkum (2007). The
following examples serve to illustrate lawyer enrichments. The underlined
elements represent the focus of the enrichment undertaken.
Example 6
4.1 Each of the parties has 4.1 Hver af parterne har 4.1 Each of the parties has
acquired his or her separate erhvervet deres respektive acquired their respective
property independently of aktiver uafhængigt af og assets independently of and
and without any uden økonomisk (A) without financial contri-
contribution from the other bidrag fra den anden part. bution from the other party.
Strictly speaking, „contribution‟ might involve other types of contribution
than the mere financial one. Consequently, narrowing „contribution‟ to
„financial contribution‟ is an instance of explicitating one of several
possible implicatures. Lawyer 1 makes this implicature explicit in his TT
by adding økonomisk. We have no way of knowing whether this is a
conscious strategy, but we assume that he has encoded his interpretation
process linguistically in the TT, thereby narrowing down the number of
possible scenarios to one. A similar situation is seen in Example 7.
Example 7
4.4. Neither party shall 4.4. Ingen af Parterne kan 4.4. Neither Party may
make any claim during the gøre krav helt eller delvist make any claim, neither
Marriage to the property in (A) på ejerskab af den wholly or in part to
the separate absolute anden parts fuldstændige ownership of the other
beneficial ownership of the særeje under ægteskabet, party‟s completely separate
other and each of them og hver Part frafalder property during the
agrees to release all rights uigenkaldeligt (A) enhver marriage, and each Party
and not to pursue claims in rettighed en Part måtte irrevocably releases any
respect of any rights which erhverve […] rights a Party may acquire
he or she might acquire […]
[…]
In the English ST, „any claim‟ has a very broad meaning. This meaning is
narrowed down in Lawyer 2‟s translation, in that information is added
about the type of claim, i.e. ejerskab („ownership‟), and the ways in which
this ownership can be held, i.e. helt eller delvist („wholly or in part‟).
Similarly, the ST refers to releasing all rights, and in the translation, this
situation is specified as releasing such rights irrevocably. Again, these
additions may reflect the interpretation processes of Lawyer 2.
Similar instances of narrowing of legal conceptual content are not
seen in the translator translations. As we have no process data, it is not
possible to say whether the same types of inference processes were
undertaken by the translators but without leaving any traces in the TTs.
Nevertheless, there are inference processes reflected in the translator

translations in the form of additions, e.g. explicitations of discourse
relations through the addition of connectives as seen in Example 8.
Example 8
Source text Translator 3 Back-translation
4.1 Each of the parties […] 4.1 Hver part […] og 4.1 Each party […] and
wishes to retain his or her ønsker at beholde såvel wishes to retain both the
separate property, whether nuværende som senere present and later acquired
owned now or acquired anskaffet særeje, således at separate property, so that
later, free from any claim (A) den anden part ikke kan the other party cannot make
of the other by virtue of the gøre krav derpå på grund af any claim thereto by virtue
Marriage […] indgåelse af ægteskabet of the contraction of the
[…] marriage […]
7. Conclusion
The analysis shows that explicitations and implicitations are used by both
groups. It also shows that the lawyers, generally speaking, undertake these
transfer operations to a higher degree than the translators, and furthermore
that there is a greater preference for implicitations in the form of reductions
in the lawyer group.
We identify three major reasons behind choices of explicitations and
implicitations. The first has to do with drafting style conventions, which are
different in the two legal systems. Adapting to target language conventions
in terms of dividing sentences leads to the use of additions. Members of
both groups use this strategy, which does not involve any risk since the
operation mainly entails the insertion or repetition of relevant lexical
elements to comply with syntactic needs.
However, when it comes to implicitations a different pattern
emerges. Here quite long qualifying phrases as well as near-synonymous
expressions, which characterise the drafting style and explicitness level of
English contracts, are left out in the lawyer translations. This, of course,
involves a risk since information is transformed from being explicit to
being implicit, which presupposes that the TT reader is able to make the
necessary inferences intended by the ST. The translators do not make such
implicitations; they stay quite close to the ST structure, and do not seem to
want to assume the same kind of risk as the lawyers.
The second reason identified for resorting to explicitations and

implicitations has to do with coping with differences in legal concepts.
When faced with an English legal concept, the lawyer group seem to bias
their translation towards their own legal system, disregarding any
differences, whereas the translators to a greater degree are preoccupied
with conveying the English legal reality to the TT reader.
The choices made by the lawyers involve a certain amount of risk
that has to do with not being faithful to the English ST. They change the
perspective by describing a legal situation, as they know it from their own
Danish practice. We assume that this reflects their usual role as descriptive
language users where they are used to taking risks in terms of committing
themselves to the truth value of their descriptions of legal scenarios. This
type of risk is not taken by the translators. So it seems that there is a
difference in the understanding of the two groups of what a relevant
translation of such legal concepts is.
The third reason underlying explicitation and implicitation choices
has to do with legal scenarios and how they are rendered in the TT. The
lawyers opt for translations that entail a narrowing of the relevant legal
conceptual content, thereby assuming a risk by committing themselves to
the truth value of the resulting narrower utterance. The data provided no
evidence of such narrowing on the part of the translators. We assume that
the risk of narrowing operations is either considered too high by the
translators or in conflict with the traditional fidelity principles of legal
translation. Yet, the data also hold evidence of translators making explicit
what we take to be their own understanding process in the form of
enrichment, e.g., in connection with explicitations of discourse relations.
The difference between the two types of risks undertaken here is that the
lawyers risk having changed the ST legal reality in relation to the ST
intentions, and the translators risk that any conflicting encyclopaedic
knowledge of the TT reader prevents him or her from making the intended
inferences.
With respect to our hypothesis, the analyses seem to indicate that the
traditional roles and different approaches to text production in terms of
descriptive and interpretive language use do not affect the use of
explicitations, which is quite high for both groups. However, the major
difference which might be related to this different language usage is found
in connection with implicitations, the lawyers using this operation most

frequently and radically. Thus we find that the data show evidence to
support the asymmetry hypothesis but only in the case of the translators,
presumably because of the traditional roles of the two groups of using
language descriptively and interpretatively and their different approaches to
the notion of ST fidelity.
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Translation Studies 9(1): 27–42.
The necessary degree of precision revisited1
Paul Kußmaul
Abstract
Deciding on the degree of precision in translation can be seen as a means of

managing risk, which is a central aim of all kinds of translating and especially
of social-survey translations, the area from which the main examples are
derived in this contribution. The paper traces the origin and history of the
principle of the necessary degree of precision, first proposed by Hönig and
Kußmaul in 1982, within a functional approach, and it shows that cognitive
linguistic models can be used to underpin this principle. The final part deals
with precision in comprehension, the phase that necessarily precedes
translation. The cognitive notions prototype and scene are used to illustrate the
close interdependence between comprehension and translation.
1. Precision and risk
Translating is not always smooth and steady. Arnt Lykke Jakobsen (2005)
observed translation processes via the typing behaviour of translators and found
that the cognitive rhythm, as he calls it, of translators was disrupted by pauses in
a significant way. Pauses occurred when translators were facing a semantic
obstacle (Jakobsen 2005: 113). When trying to overcome such obstacles,
translators, in my experience, are often faced with the question how precise they
have to be when translating a text. I have been involved in the translation of
social surveys for some years now, and there this question seems especially
pertinent, as will become evident from some of my examples below. The
translation of social surveys created a new incentive for me to reflect again upon
the principle of the necessary degree of precision. I shall begin by discussing
some closely related concepts.
There is a notional connection between precision and literalness. A literal
translation, so the common thinking goes, is more precise than a free translation.
1
I am making use of some of the material from my book Verstehen und Übersetzen (2007),
but in the way it is presented here I hope to have added some new ideas.
360 Paul Kußmaul
There is a popular maxim in German that states “Übersetze so wörtlich wie

möglich und so frei wie nötig”, which could be rendered in English as “stick to a
literal translation whenever possible and use a free translation when necessary”.
However, when trying to apply this maxim we realise that it is rather vague,
since it is left to the translator to decide what is necessary.
Making decisions often means taking risks. Wrong decisions can have
negative, sometimes disastrous consequences. A free translation may have the
effect of changing or even distorting the meaning of the source text and
impeding comprehension, or even making it impossible. Even if we are
convinced of having rendered the meaning correctly and comprehensibly by
means of a free translation, our translation may not be accepted by the people
who commissioned it, because they have different standards of correctness.
Translators who cannot afford to lose their customers will try to avoid such a
situation. One of my colleagues in survey translations told me: “I usually play it
safe.” And with playing safe she meant avoiding risks. I am not sure if it is in
fact possible to avoid risks, and I am not at all sure they should be avoided.
Some years ago Wolfram Wilss drew attention to the fact that translating
is indeed a risky adventure (Wilss 2005: passim). Translating means making
decisions, and decisions involve a great deal of uncertainty about their outcome
(Wilss 2005: 662). It would thus be very helpful if translators knew how to
manage uncertainty instead of avoiding risks. Management of uncertainty, as I
shall show, does not mean taking no risks, but rather it means knowing how to
deal with them.
There are two popular concepts that can be seen in connection with risk
avoidance and, if properly applied, also with risk management. I shall briefly
discuss these in order to show what the updated principle of the necessary
degree of precision refers to. The two concepts are explicitation and
equivalence.
As to explicitation, it has been observed that translations are often longer
than the originals. One of the reasons seems to be that target texts tend to be
more explicit than source texts (for an overview see Shuttleworth & Cowie
1997: 55f.; Englund Dimitrova 2005: passim; Klaudy 2009: 104–108). For
instance, nuances of meaning that are only implied in the source text are
expressed by additional words in the translation, implicit logical relations
between sentences are expressed by conjunctions or adverbs, culture-specific
concepts, geographical names, names of famous people are explained, etc. This
kind of behaviour can be interpreted as an attempt to minimise, if not avoid,
The necessary degree of precision revisited 361
risks (Klaudy 2009: 108). The more explicit I am, translators seem to think, the
more precise my translation will be and the more sure I can be that there will be
no loss of information. Being more explicit than the source text is a technique,
no doubt, that can increase precision. But translators need to know the
conditions requiring more explicitness and how explicit they should be. From
the point of view of Descriptive Translation Studies, explicitation has been
described as a common phenomenon; Chesterman even calls it a translation law
(1997: 71). From the point of view of translation didactics, which is actually my
own point of departure, mere description is not quite satisfactory. Further
questions should be asked about how comprehension functions psychologically
and how translation functions when one looks at its purpose, as I shall show
below.
The concept of equivalence, which has been discussed a great deal in
Translation Studies and in translator training right from the beginning, has not
been associated explicitly with minimising risks so far. However, the fascination
that the notion held for translators was based on the hope of finding symmetrical
items between two languages, and if this had been possible, there would no
longer have been risks. With the widening of the field of linguistics, pragmatic
factors were included, and thus the notion of equivalence became more and
more diversified (for overviews, see Shuttleworth & Cowie 1997: 49–51;
Neubert 2004: 338; and Koller 2004: 351). From a functional point of view (i.e.
looking at the purpose of the target text, see below) the notion of equivalence
might still be used if the function of the target text is the same as that of the
source text.
This is the case in the translation of social surveys, which I mentioned
above. Equivalence for survey questions means that exactly the same question
must be asked in the target text as in the source text, in order to guarantee
correct comprehension, and prevent respondents from falsifying their answers.2
In survey translation research this is called the ASQ (Ask the Same Question)
Model (Harkness 2003: 35). To achieve this goal a number of steps are taken
before a translation is used in a large and expensive survey. These are called the
TRAPD procedure, where the acronym stands for Translation, Review,
Adjudication, Pretesting, Documentation (Harkness 2003: 38). This large
number of steps forms the organisational basis for equivalence and can indeed
2
I know that this is a very optimistic, if not unrealistic, aim. Deconstructionists would have a
lot to say to this, but such is the situation in survey translating.
362 Paul Kußmaul
be seen as a form of risk management. Still, the success of this procedure

depends on what happens within these phases. In my experience it certainly does
not mean simply translating questions literally. Again and again, when
discussing our translations in the review phase, we asked ourselves what the
function of a question was and how the question could best be adapted to the
target culture. As a member of this group I used to argue along the lines of the
principle of the necessary degree of precision.
2. The origin and history of the necessary degree of precision
It was mainly from discontent with the above-mentioned notion of equivalence

that Hans Hönig and I put forward the “principle of the necessary degree of
precision” in our book Strategie der Übersetzung in 1982 (Hönig & Kußmaul
1982). When assessing translations, instead of stating that a word, phrase, clause
or sentence was translated in an equivalent way, we proposed stating that it was
suitably differentiated or, if it was not translated well enough, that it was over-
differentiated or underdifferentiated. The criterion for making such judgments
was the function of the translation in the target culture.3
Until then the notion of equivalence, with its exclusive focus on the
source text, had been the main criterion for making statements about the quality
of translations. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, this view began to be
questioned. Hans Vermeer had already published some articles (e.g. Vermeer
1978, 1979) in which, looking at things the other way round, he proposed
focussing on the target text within the target culture and discussing the function
of a translation from this point of view. In 1984 Hans Vermeer and Katharina
Reiß published Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie, in which
they presented a detailed account of the functional approach, called the skopos
theory, which was to become most influential in the years to follow. It was
against this background that Mary Snell-Hornby took up the principle of the
necessary degree of precision and made it known to an English-speaking
3
Jakobsen observed that pauses in the translation process were often followed by “peak
performances”. This kind of behaviour, he says, might be a sign that “having spent
processing time on identifying a subject domain or a communicative intention or on finding
an appropriate style, experts are able to use their specific-subject domain identification or
their understanding of a communicative intention to control the construction of a familiar
scene in an appropriate style” (Jakobsen 2005: 115). This interpretation, I think, has a close
affinity to the criteria Hönig and I suggested for deciding on the degree of precision and can
be seen as a skill of risk reduction.
audience (Snell-Hornby 1988: 44ff.), so that it eventually appeared as an entry

in the Dictionary of Translation Studies by Mark Shuttleworth and Moira Cowie
(1997). It was also discussed in introductory books on translation, often with a
view to translator training (Hohenadl & Will 1994: 39, 84; Kautz 2000: 110–
113; Prunč 2001: 158–160; Stolze 2001: 146). Translator training, in fact, was
the aim we had in mind. Was our principle understood in the way we had
intended? Yes, but sometimes in too specific and sometimes in too general a
sense.
One misunderstanding was that it was occasionally taken to be a strategy
for translating cultural terms only (e.g. by Shuttleworth and Cowie 1994), but
we had intended it to be a general strategy. This narrowing down of the scope of
our strategy may have been caused by the main example we had provided,
which I shall briefly present again. The names of famous public schools in
England, Hönig and I stated, should be translated differently in the following
sentences (we are dealing with sentences here as if they were texts), depending
on the context (Hönig/Kußmaul 1982: 53–59):
(1) In Parliament he fought for equality, but he sent his son to Winchester.
(2) When his father died, his mother could not afford to send him to Eton any more.
According to the principle of the necessary degree of precision the translations
could be
(1a) Im Parlament kämpfte er für Chancengleichheit, aber seinen eigenen Sohn schickte
er auf eine der englischen Eliteschulen (… but his own son he sent to one of the
English elitist schools).
(2a) Als sein Vater starb, konnte seine Mutter es sich nicht mehr leisten, ihn auf eine der
teuren Privatschulen zu schicken (… to send him to one of the expensive private
schools).
Both (1a) and (2a) are suitably differentiated or, to put it in non-technical terms,
precise enough. A translation such as
(1b) Im Parlament kämpfte er für Chancengleichheit, aber seinen eigenen Sohn schickte
er nach Winchester (… but his own son he sent to Winchester).
would not be precise enough (i.e. underdifferentiated), because the general
German reader does not know what Winchester stands for. A translation,
however, such as
(2b) Als sein Vater starb, konnte seine Mutter es sich nicht mehr leisten, ihn nach Eton
zu schicken, jene teure englische Privatschule, aus deren Absolventen auch heute
noch ein Großteil des politischen und wirtschaftlichen Führungsnachwuchses
hervorgeht ( … to send him to Eton, that expensive English private school, from
364 Paul Kußmaul
whose graduates a large number of the political and economic leaders are still
being recruited).
would be much too detailed (i.e. overdifferentiated). Although the translator has
made explicit what was implied in the English sentence, so much additional
information has been provided that the most important information, namely
“expensive”, has almost been blotted out. If, however, the topic of the text had
been “the British educational system”, such a translation might have been
possible.
In this example the item in question is a cultural term, but the principle of
the necessary degree of precision can be used for solving problems occurring
with the translation of any word; indeed, as we showed in the individual
chapters of Strategie der Übersetzung, for problems occurring at all linguistic
levels: style, syntax, cohesion of sentences, and illocution.4 I shall discuss a non-
cultural example below.
With respect to translation errors, the principle of the necessary degree of
precision was occasionally understood in too general a sense. When my students
read Strategie der Übersetzung they sometimes asked: “Can we still use the
terms „correct‟ and „wrong‟ when discussing translations or do we have to
replace what was called „wrong‟ until now by either „underdifferentiated‟ or
„overdifferentiated‟?”
This is a point Hans Hönig and I should have discussed, and which was
taken up by Anthony Pym ten years later (Pym 1992), who proposes
distinguishing between binary and non-binary errors. Binary errors, he states,
can be described within the dimension of right/wrong; that is, we can make a
qualitative judgement. For instance, if sentence (1) had been translated as
(1c) Im Parlament kämpfte er für Chancengleichheit, aber seinen eigenen Sohn schickte
er auf die öffentliche Schule in Winchester (… but his own son he sent to the state
school in Winchester).
this would simply be wrong. As we know, the famous school there is not
“public” in the sense of a state school, but rather private.
Non-binary errors, however, meet with commentaries such as “It is not
exactly wrong, but …” or “Maybe we can improve it a bit and say…”. These are
quantitative judgements and, from this point of view, translations can be judged
by saying, for example, that they are not good enough, are better than another
4
Some years later I underpinned our principle with Grice‟s maxims of quantity and
relevance (Kußmaul 1995: 92f.).
one, or could be better. Quantitative judgements can be made, as we have seen,

for translations (1b) and (2b).
Quantity is a very helpful category when judging translations and, indeed,
when talking about verbal communication in general. Researchers on translation
have made use of psycholinguistic models where quantity plays an important
part, and the principle of the necessary degree of precision can be linked to these
models in order to put it on a firm theoretical basis. Hönig and I started to do
this in our book when discussing the activation of relevant features of the
meanings of words (1982: 94). We referred to Hörmann (1976: 139), who again
refers to Barclay et al. (1974). In the meantime more models have been adopted
by translation researchers.
3. The use of cognitive models
I shall explain these models by discussing an example. The section of the

International Social Survey Program (ISSP) 2000 on social networks and
support systems included the following item:
(3) Now, suppose you needed to borrow a large sum of money, who would you turn to
first for help? (Underlining in the original.)
The translation ran:
Angenommen, Sie müssten sich eine hohe Geldsumme leihen. An wen würden Sie sich
in diesem Fall zuerst wenden?
To give an idea of what is meant by social network and support, I include the
answer categories:
spouse close friend

mother neighbour
father colleague
daughter employer
son governmental or social institution
sister bank
brother private moneylender
other relative other person
godparent nobody
Let us go back to the stage where we have to decide between variants. For “a
large sum of money” quite a number of translations suggest themselves in
German (tentative English translations have been added in brackets):
366 Paul Kußmaul
eine beachtliche Geldsumme (a remarkable sum of money)

eine beträchtliche Geldsumme (a considerable sum of money)
eine hohe Geldsumme (a high sum of money)
eine große Geldsumme (a large sum of money)
eine größere Geldsumme (a relatively large sum of money)
ziemlich viel Geld (quite a lot of money. The German phrase does not
sound colloquial though.)
sehr viel Geld (a great deal of money. The German phrase is not
colloquial.)
viel Geld (a lot of money. The German phrase is not colloquial.)
eine Menge Geld (lots of money. The German phrase is colloquial.)
“Large sum” is, of course, not polysemous, but the translation variants seem to
have slight differences in meaning, and the question is: Which one is precise
enough? First of all, there are slight differences between the adjectives referring
to the amount of money, which I have tried to indicate in the English
translations. Do these differences matter for the question? For instance, is there a
difference between the variants as to the amount of money? Is beachtlich
(„remarkable‟) the same as groß („large‟), and is größer („larger‟/„relatively
large‟) more or less than groß? Furthermore, sehr viel Geld („a great deal of
money‟) is certainly more money than viel Geld („a lot of money‟). But then, is
viel Geld more money or less than ziemlich viel Geld („quite a lot of money‟)?
Moreover, the German variants differ stylistically. Eine Menge („lots of‟) is
more colloquial than beachtlich („remarkable‟) or beträchtlich („considerable‟).
And Geldsumme („sum of money‟) sounds more formal than just saying Geld
(„money‟).
Adopting a functional approach to translation allows us to decide on the
variants for the translation. The purpose (or function) of the question within the
overall framework of the questionnaire is to discover whom one would turn to
for support. We might say that the function of the phrase is to suggest a
prototypical scene about borrowing money, such as when someone tells a friend
he has financial problems but has to make a large purchase, and asks him if he
could lend him some money. I use the notion of prototype with its connected
notions core and fuzzy edges (see below) in the same way as Rosch (1973) and
Lakoff (1987).
With scene I am referring to Fillmore‟s scenes and frames theory
(Fillmore 1977), which is based on prototype semantics and has been applied to
translation by quite a number of scholars (cf. Vannerem & Snell-Hornby 1986;

Snell-Hornby 1988: 79ff.; Vermeer &Witte 1990, passim; Neubert & Shreve
1992: 59f.; Kußmaul 1995: 13–15, 35–36, 94–97; Hönig 1995: 94–96; Kußmaul
2000: 106–119; Kußmaul 2007: passim). In its interpretation of linguistic
utterances this theory relies strongly on people‟s experiences of the world and
also on their experience of the text they read or hear. Words and phrases in a
text (= frames in Fillmore‟s terminology) activate typical representations (=
scenes in Fillmore‟s terminology) in the minds of the readers, which are part of
a scene or situation they have known for some time or which have been
previously activated by that text.
Now, the prototypical amount of money involved in a social-network and
support scene – and social networks and support were the topic of a number of
previous questions in this survey, e.g. who they would turn to in case of illness
or when feeling depressed – is not just a few pounds, dollars or Euros, but a
larger sum, maybe several hundred Euros. The larger sum is, as it were, at the
core of the scene. Once we talk about borrowing in this kind of context, from the
point of view of referential meaning it does not really matter which of the
variants we choose, because the scene implies a relatively large amount of
money. In other words, the differences between the German variants are so
minimal (a quantitative notion!) that they can be ignored. In fact, it would be
precise enough to say:
(3a) Angenommen, Sie müssten Geld leihen, wen würden Sie zuerst um Hilfe bitten?
(Let‟s suppose you needed to borrow a sum of money …)
To make sure the right kind of scene appears in the minds of the respondents it
would, I think, be helpful to add an example. In surveys, as stated above, we
want to minimise risks:
(3b) Angenommen, Sie müssten Geld leihen, um z.B. Möbel oder ein Auto zu kaufen,
wen würden Sie zuerst um Hilfe bitten (Let‟s suppose you needed to borrow a sum
of money, for instance to buy furniture or a car …)
Seen from this point of view, even the source question could have been
formulated as
(3c) Now, suppose you needed to borrow money, for instance to buy furniture or a car,
who would you turn to first for help?
368 Paul Kußmaul
From the perspective of risk management, we may say that risk can be reduced
when we verbalise the core notion of the scene.5 It is interesting to see that our
translation is less detailed than the source text as to the amount of money
mentioned, but it makes use of the principle of explicitation, thus facilitating the
evocation of a scene.
Regarding another linguistic level to which the principle of the necessary
degree of precision can be applied, namely that of style, we can see that some of
the other translation variants listed earlier differ on this dimension. For instance,
eine beträchtliche Geldsumme is more formal, i.e. implies a more distant author-
reader relationship than the colloquial eine Menge Geld, which is a sign of
greater familiarity. From a functional point of view, translators will have to
imagine the kind of relationship between interviewer and respondent (the
questionnaire scene) in order to make their stylistic decisions. An oral interview,
for instance, will have a different style from a written interview.
To sum up this section, what translators working in a functionalist
framework do with words is determined by the function of the words (here the
topic “borrowing money”) within a passage of a text that suggests a specific
scene (here the support scene). The text is potentially seen as embedded in a
specific situation (here the questionnaire situation) in a specific culture (here
German culture). For instance, if the questionnaire has to be translated for a
culture where borrowing money is improper, one would have to find some other
equivalent material that can be borrowed, such as perhaps food.
4. What, precisely, is meant in the source text?
Our focus so far has been on the target text. Writing the target text, however,
occurs in close and constant interaction with understanding the source text. As
normal readers, we may occasionally have the feeling that the meaning of a
word or passage we have read is not quite clear to us, but we usually do not
bother too much about it and are sometimes content with a vague understanding.
Translators are in a different situation. They have to express in writing what they
have understood, and remaining vague is usually not what is expected of them. 6
5
In a more recent article on survey research, Fillmore draws attention to the fact that
questions will evoke prototypical notions in the minds of respondents (1999: 192f., 196).
6
It has been observed in eye-tracking studies that source-text comprehension seems to be a
problem, especially for translation students (Jakobsen & Jensen 2008: 112, 119, Sharmin et
al. 2008: 48). Specifically, measuring the eye-key span, i.e. the time between the eye
The principle of the necessary degree of precision, as it was proposed by Hönig

and myself, has so far been used for deciding on the wording of the target text.
This is certainly one side of the coin, but the other side is the comprehension of
the source text, for which the cognitive models forming the basis of the
necessary degree of precision can also be used, as I shall show by means of an
example.
In the survey ISSP 2001, again in the section about social relations and
support systems, one of the questions was:
(4) Suppose you wanted the local government to bring about some improvement in
your local community. How likely is it that you would be able to do something
about it?
This was translated into German as
(4a) Stellen Sie sich Folgendes vor: Sie möchten, dass Ihre Stadt oder Gemeinde eine
Verbesserung oder Modernisierung in Ihrem Stadtteil / Ihrer Gemeinde veranlasst.
Wie wahrscheinlich ist es, dass Sie das erreichen können?
Let us look at “local community”. It is important to translate it in such a way
that the respondents can easily imagine the area meant here. What exactly is this
area? Perhaps the main thing we want to know is: How big is it? This, again, is a
quantitative notion with fuzzy edges. When we think of the government‟s
responsibility, in the context of “local” we may think of a town, city or village,
but we might also think of a smaller unit. The size is important here, because the
smaller it is, the closer it is to the people living there and the more easily they
can identify with it, and identification is the main motivation for asking the
government for improvement of the area. Is Stadtteil („district‟) truly small
enough? Gemeinde („municipality‟) certainly is not, as it refers to a town or
village as a whole, and apart from that it is a somewhat technical term used in
town administration, and technical terms do not exactly facilitate easy
comprehension for the normal reader.
Source texts are typically not written in the translators‟ mother tongue,
and translators are sometimes not completely sure of the meaning of a word.
They may, in our case, know “local newspaper” or “local pub”, but what about
“local community”? Their comprehension often needs to be assisted by research
tools. Many translators turn to bilingual dictionaries such as
Langenscheidt/Collins Großwörterbuch Englisch, where for “local community”
fixation on a specific source-text item and its translation, can be used as a means of
identifying words that cause problems (Dragsted & Hansen 2008: passim). Seen from a
didactic point of view, cognitive models can perhaps help to make comprehension a more
conscious affair and overcome problems with the translation of words.
370 Paul Kußmaul
one finds the German equivalent Kommune. This, like Gemeinde, is also a
technical term used in city administration, but for the non-specialist, and perhaps
for some older German readers, this word might also suggest the way anti-
bourgeois young people of the 1968 generation lived together and shared
possessions and responsibilities. A dictionary on the Internet (dict.cc) offers
Gemeinwesen. This is certainly not as ambiguous as Kommune, but is still a
technical term and not easy to understand for the normal reader. The Longman
Dictionary of Contemporary English, which being a monolingual dictionary is
always much more useful in cases such as this, offers: “people who live in the
same area, town etc.”, a definition, however, which still remains vague in terms
of the size.
We can complement linguistic with encyclopaedic information. In
Wikipedia we find
Local community is a geographically defined community of place, a group of people

living close to each other.
The term community suggests that its members have some relations that are communal
― experiences, values, and/or interests may be shared, they may interact with each
other and are concerned about mutual and collective well-being.
Local community has been an issue of concern in social criticism and theoretical
sociology, among others, especially in contrast to the modern society. The central idea,
either expressed or rejected, is that local community has been in decline, if not lost, in
our contemporary life.
This detailed information can eventually help us imagine a prototypical scene. I

would like to stress this, because these kinds of comprehension processes can
form the starting point for a translation. Comprehension and translation are
closely intertwined as I observed in think-aloud protocols (TAPs) (Kußmaul
1995: 28–31; Kußmaul 2000: 78; Kußmaul 2007: 146–156). First of all, the
words “people living close to each other” suggest that “local community” is
indeed a smaller unit. Not all of the information offered is probably relevant in
our context of “bringing about improvements”. But the words “interests” or
“collective well-being” can, I think, be regarded as core notions for our
purposes. With a little bit of imagination we may think of improvements such as
better streets, pedestrian areas, bicycle paths and the like, and when we think of
such things, we understand that it is the area where we live. This is important for
preserving the intention (function) of the question, which is to find out about
what people think their influence is on government decisions in matters of
community support. We must prevent respondents from thinking of the outskirts
of the city, town or village, because they would not feel concerned about a more
distant area. As a translation I would suggest:
(4b) … in der Gegend, in der Sie wohnen … (… in the area where you live …)
This is a paraphrase of the words in the source text – a very common and indeed
often advisable technique in translating. In the ISSP 2008 in the context of a
different survey topic (religion), the notion of “local community” was expressed
by means of “neighbourhood”, and in the review phase we discussed Gegend,
Viertel and Wohngegend as possible translation variants and finally decided on
Wohngegend. This could also be used here, since it refers to a smaller area and
has the implications needed for our purposes. Translators who feel attached to
the term “equivalence” may use the term “equivalent” – I have no objections –
for both translations.
5. Conclusion
Risk management, as we have seen, does not mean risk avoidance, but rather
risk reduction. Risk reduction can be achieved by translating according to the
principle of the necessary degree of precision. The criterion for precision is
provided by the function of the item to be translated. In our examples, the
function of the survey questions in the translation was the same as in the source
text. Still, translating the questions in such a way that respondents can smoothly
and easily understand them, i.e. imagine the right kind of scene, is not an easy
task. It is via the scenes evoked by the words that comprehension and translation
are closely connected. Making use of the notions of prototypicality and scenes,
we may say that sticking to the core of the scene that is evoked by the source
text will help translators find sufficiently precise words for their translations.
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Looking for a working definition of ’translation strategies’
Riitta Jääskeläinen
Abstract
This article takes up the tricky notion of “translation strategies”, which

has been defined in many different ways in translation studies and
elsewhere. The article offers a survey of different strategy notions and their
definitions. Various categories of translation strategies are also introduced,
such textual and procedural (Kearns 2008), local and global (Séguinot
1989; Jääskeläinen 1993) and product- and process-oriented strategies
(Korhonen 1998). Finally, an attempt will be made to relate the different
strategy notions to one another.
1. Introduction
There seems to be a great deal of confusion caused by the notion of

“translation strategies” in the field of translation studies, not least in the
minds of students, who tend to find it difficult to find their way among the
related and overlapping senses of “translation strategy”. This unfortunate
state of affairs has been criticised by e.g. Lörscher (1991: 68), who
maintains that in translation studies “[strategy] denotes highly different
phenomena and very rarely is it defined precisely”. More recently, Gambier
(2008) has tackled the strategy issue in an attempt to clarify terminology.
Strategies have proved to be difficult to define in other fields as well.
For example, in second language (L2) research, Bialystok maintains that
“vigorous debate among researchers has failed to yield a universally
acceptable definition” (Bialystok 1990: 1). In cognitive psychology, the
shift from analysing externally observable behaviour to investigating
mental processes resulted in a similar problem: “As the concept of strategy
has become more prevalent, it has also become increasingly ambiguous [...]
investigators rarely define it explicitly” (Kail and Bisanz 1982: 229).
376 Riitta Jääskeläinen
“Translation strategy” is admittedly one of the elusive concepts in

translation studies; sometimes strategies refer to different phenomena,
while at other times the same phenomenon is referred to by different
names, such as procedures, methods, or tactics – even “norms” are virtually
identical to some uses of “strategy”. As a result, it is not always totally
clear what one is referring to when talking about “translation strategies”.
The issue has plagued me for years and I have returned to it from time to
time, trying to work out what is going on with strategies. This article is
built on my previous attempts at clarifying the strategy issue (Jääskeläinen
1993, 2007; see also Jääskeläinen & Kujamäki 2005), and its aims are
twofold: to provide a survey of some of the different uses of “translation
strategy” and to propose a way to relate the different strategy notions to
each other. However, as will become clear by the end of this article, more
attempts will be required.
2. Overview of definitions
In translation process research, Englund Dimitrova (2005: 26) sums up the

strategy notions used in translation studies: “A first distinction can be made
between definitions and classifications that are based only on textual
features, and those based on other kinds of evidence and data, e.g. TAPs
[think-aloud protocols].” Similarly, Kearns (2008) divides translation
strategies into textual and procedural strategies, although, as he points out,
the difference between the two is not always clear. To put it simply,
strategies relate to things which happen with texts, such as domestication or
foreignisation (e.g. Venuti 1998, see Section 2.1.), and to things which take
place during the translation process and which can be traced in translators‟
verbalisations, for example. The two are obviously related, as one would
assume that what takes place in the process will be reflected in the product.
Furthermore, from the point of view of translator training, to bring about
lasting effects on the quality of the product, we need to tamper with the
process.
Although, logically, process precedes product, I will begin my
survey of translation strategies by looking at the product-related notions of
strategy.
Looking for a working definition of „translation strategies‟ 377
2.1 Product view
To start with things that happen with texts, Venuti (1998: 240) describes
translation strategies as follows:
Strategies of translation involve the basic tasks of choosing the foreign text to be
translated and developing a method to translate it. Both of these tasks are
determined by various factors: cultural, economic, political. Yet the many
different strategies that have emerged since antiquity can perhaps be divided into
two large categories. A translation project may conform to values currently
dominating the target-language culture [...] [i.e. domesticate]. Alternatively, a
translation project may resist and aim to revise the dominant [target-culture
values, i.e. foreignise].
Venuti‟s strategies seem to comprise higher-level text-related phenomena,

such as translation policies which influence subsequent decisions on
translation “methods”.
In addition, there are several taxonomies of strategies (or procedures,
methods, tactics, techniques) which deal with solving individual translation
problems. Typically, these strategies give a label to the relationship
between a source text (ST) item and its target text (TT) equivalent (in the
loosest sense of the word). For instance (the examples have been taken
from Leppihalme 2001), the ST item spotted dick can be translated with a
superordinate term in the target language (in this case Finnish) as
jälkiruoka („dessert‟). In other cases, the ST item may be loaned directly
(Stilton > stilton) or in a slightly modified form (pub > pubi) to the TT.
Sometimes a ST item may be omitted. Chesterman (1997) also presents a
wide array of similar strategies grouped under three headings: syntactic,
semantic, and pragmatic strategies. In fact, many of these correspond to
Lörscher‟s (1991) methods, i.e. “tried and tested procedures” for solving
problems, which will be introduced in Section 2.2.1. However, it is not
always clear in what sense the ST items and their translation methods are
“problems”; often the translator can simply choose the existing established
equivalent, as in pub > pubi without any problems.
The examples above show that translation strategies in the product
sense relate to different kinds of (textual) phenomena or phenomena on
different levels: foreignising and domesticating are general approaches,
while direct transfer or using a superordinate term deal with the solution of
concrete individual problems. If a foreignising strategy is adopted, then it is
likely that culture-bound items will be translated by e.g. direct transfer.
Thus, such textual strategies can be labelled as global (e.g. foreignising) or

local (e.g. direct transfer, omission). The idea of global and local strategies
will be further discussed in Section 2.2.2.
It is also important to realise that a thorough analysis of the local
textual strategies used in a translated text allows highly informed guesses
about the global strategies that may have guided the translator in his or her
task. One example of such a study is Kujamäki (2001), who analysed the
translation strategies employed in almost a dozen German translations of
the Finnish novel Seitsemän veljestä (The Seven Brothers) over a period of
about sixty years. By looking at the local strategies used to translate
culture-specific realia, Kujamäki is able to identify trends, i.e. potential
global strategies, which made one translation informative, almost
anthropological, and another an adapted version for young readers, etc.
2.2 Process view
Introducing the process view of translation strategies into translation

studies is usually attributed to Levý (1989/1967). According to Levý (1989:
38), from the point of view of the translator, “translating is a DECISION
PROCESS: a series of a certain number of consecutive situations – moves,
as in a game – situations imposing on the translator the necessity of
choosing among a certain (and very often exactly definable) number of
alternatives.” Levý‟s discussion of translators‟ decisions relies on game
theory, and focuses on individual lexical choices. Levý also draws attention
to the fact that theory might not always work in practice:
Translation theory tends to be normative, to instruct translators on the optimal
solution; actual translation work, however, is pragmatic; the translator resolves
for that one of the possible solutions which promises a maximum of effect with a
minimum of effort. (Levý 1989: 49)
This Minimax strategy, as Levý calls it, reflects the reality of

translating – it is not always possible to attain the perfect solution.
However, there is evidence indicating that translators do strive for the
optimal (in the sense of the best possible) solution in a particular translating
situation. On the other hand, Levý‟s game theoretical approach seems to be
idealised in that it assumes that translators make their decisions based on
fact and information. In reality, empirical research shows (e.g. Jääskeläinen
1999, Hansen 2006, Shih 2006) that translators often base their decisions
on intuitive criteria along the lines “this sounds better/odd/fluent” or “this
doesn‟t sound like Finnish/Danish/etc.”. It is difficult to determine whether
such criteria reflect internalised knowledge or genuine language intuition
(finding answers to this question could be an interesting research project).
In their textbook of translation, Hönig & Kußmaul (1982) also
mention the need for a strategy which would help the translator to find an
optimal solution for each particular translation problem. According to them
(1982: 58), the translator decides on a general approach on the basis of the
ST and the translation brief; the general approach, or strategy, will guide
the subsequent syntactic and lexical decisions. As will be shown below,
there is evidence that Hönig & Kußmaul‟s didactic recommendation is
what professional translators and advanced students of translation tend to
do in practice.
2.2.1 Problem-solving strategies

In process studies, which emerged in the mid-1980s, translation strategies
became a central research tool. Lörscher (1991: 76) defines translation
strategies as follows (emphasis added): “a potentially conscious procedure
for the solution of a problem which an individual is faced with when
translating a text segment from one language to another”. Similarly, Krings
(e.g. 1986: 175; emphasis added) defines translation strategies as “a
translator‟s potentially conscious plans for solving concrete translation
problems in the framework of a concrete translation task” (translation
Englund Dimitrova 2005: 26). This definition of translation strategies thus
refers to plans or procedures for solving individual problems in translation.
The definition is based on research into communication strategies in L2
acquisition research (particularly Færch and Kasper 1980).
In addition, for Lörscher as well as other scholars working with a
problem-oriented definition, translation strategies are goal-oriented. The
goal is to solve a concrete translation problem. Strategies are closely
related to other goal-oriented concepts, namely method, plan, rule and
tactic. According to Lörscher (1991: 68), strategies are individual, but
methods are supra-individual tried and tested procedures with which goals
can be achieved with a high degree of probability. Lörscher‟s methods thus
seem to refer to the established ways of solving translation problems, e.g.
direct transfer, calque, or omission. According to Lörscher (1991), plans

represent action mentally, whereas strategies contain procedural knowledge
(i.e., knowledge about how things are done). Rules, in turn, are socially
prescriptive, and violating them may result in sanctions. Finally, tactics
control a concrete action or part of it within the entire process, while
strategies refer to sequences of actions. Lörscher‟s own analysis focuses on
“translation strategies”, which makes it difficult to determine how the
related concepts actually differ from his strategy concept.
2.2.2 Strategies without problems

Other ways of identifying strategies in process data have also been
proposed. In a case study of a Canadian government translator‟s
processing, Séguinot (1989) observed several underlying principles that
seemed to govern the translator‟s work. These included the following:
staying as close to the French text as possible and a tendency to translate
without interruption for as long as possible. Séguinot calls these the
translator‟s global strategies (Séguinot 1989: 36) and they seem to refer to
general guidelines and consist of procedural knowledge.
Similarly, on the basis of TAP data, Jääskeläinen (1993) suggests
that translation strategies need not be limited to problem-solving strategies.
Subjects‟ verbalisations of unproblematic decisions, for example, point to
the existence of an overall plan in TT production (see below). Jääskeläinen
also suggests that translation strategies be divided into global and local
strategies; global strategies contain general guidelines, plans and principles
which are used to govern local strategies relating to problem solving and
decision making of individual ST items (cf. Hönig & Kußmaul 1982).
Examples 1 and 2 below show how this can be observed in TAPs. In
example (1), an advanced student of translation seems to be outlining a
global strategy. The ST is a short news item dealing with medical research
from the New Scientist and the brief is to translate the text to appear in the
largest Finnish daily newspaper, in a column “People around the world”,
which contains short and often humorous news items. Her global strategy
could be summarised as “Keep the style similar; simplify the text”. The
strategy is justified; the ST is short, slightly colloquial in style, and
popularises research; the texts in the target column are also short, contain
colloquialisms and even more popularised than the news items in New
Scientist. In example (1), the student first states that style may remain the
same, the text should perhaps be simplified a little, which would mean, for
instance, omitting some of the medical terms (e.g. nicotineamide). The
TAP excerpts have been translated from Finnish; the numbers in brackets
refer to the length of pauses in seconds and (.) to pauses shorter than one
second.
(1) Advanced student of translation (at the beginning of the process):
uhm the style of this piece is really quite (.) quite similar to that there (1) in the
column in Hesari (1) it needn‟t be worked on very much (7) except made a little
bit simpler perhaps (4) I don‟t know if (.) the readers of the Helsingin Sanomat
are all that int-interested in (.) what is (2) nicot- nico- nicotine amide (2) etcetera
(15) (source: Jääskeläinen 1999)
In example (2), the same student verbalises her decision to leave out
the reference to Experientia, where the research reported in the ST has been
published. By pointing out that “nobody‟s interested in it” she seems to be
referring to the TT readers whose needs she considered while outlining her
global strategy in example (1).
(2) Advanced student of translation (on leaving out the reference to
Experientia):
that reference needn‟t be written anywhere
nobody‟s interested in that or if somebody is then he can look it up himself (11)
(source: Jääskeläinen 1999)
The global and local strategies outlined above seem to be more or

less identical with the micro- and macro-strategies proposed by Hönig
(1991), who is also concerned about students‟ tendency to follow strict
micro-strategic “rules” at the expense of being guided systematically by a
macro-strategy based on an analysis of the translation situation.
Expanding the definition of translation strategies to include
unproblematic processing finds support from other fields. In L2 research,
Bialystok (1990: 4) argues that “communication strategies can occur in the
absence of problematicity”. In discourse studies, Van Dijk and Kintsch
(1983: 65) define strategies and plans as follows:
[P]lan is a global concept of the macroaction and its final result or goal, a
strategy is a global representation of the means of reaching that goal. This
overall means will dominate a number of lower level, more detailed, decisions
and actions. [...] A plan is merely a global representation of an action, for
example, „Taking a plane to New York.‟ A strategy, however, is a global mental
representation of a style, that is, a way of doing this global action in the most
effective way.
In addition, “strategies involve actions, goals, and some notion of

optimality [...] a strategy is the idea of an agent about the best way to act
in order to reach a goal” (Van Dijk and Kintsch 1983: 64f; emphasis
added). Thus, even in the absence of problems, strategies are clearly goal-
oriented. In fact, both problem- and non-problem-oriented definitions of
translation strategies agree on strategies being goal-oriented; but the goal is
different, i.e. solving an individual translation problem vs. translating a
text.
At this point, my current tentative definition of translation strategies
could be along the lines of creating a plan and procedures for producing the
best possible translation of a text on the basis of the requirements of the
translating situation, including the ST, the brief, the available resources
(global strategies) and using various methods and decision criteria to deal
with specific items in the text (local strategies). The definition is goal-
oriented and contains a feasible element of optimality (i.e. not producing
perfect translations but ones that are good enough in the circumstances).
2.2.3 Process- and product-oriented strategies

In his MA thesis, Korhonen (1998) points out that the global strategies
proposed by Séguinot (1989) and Jääskeläinen (1993) seem to include
different kinds of phenomena. On the one hand, there are procedural
guidelines, such as “be consistent” or “translate without interruption as
long as possible”. On the other hand, there are strategies which focus on
production, such as “stay as close to the French text as possible” or
“summarise and popularise the source text”. Korhonen (1998) suggests that
global strategies be divided into process-oriented and product-oriented
ones. Process-oriented global strategies aim to make the process run as
smoothly and effectively as possible. Typically, these would include the
kinds of procedural guidelines mentioned above. Process-oriented global
strategies also tend to be task-independent. Product-oriented global
strategies are more task-dependent, and aim at producing the best possible
translation product. They would contain such general approaches as
“domesticate”, “summarise” or “popularise”. The distinction between the
two is a matter of degree, as arguably all process-oriented strategies are

ultimately geared towards producing the best possible product.
Although Korhonen (1998) proposes the distinction with global
strategies in mind, perhaps it could be applied to local strategies as well.
Lörscher‟s (1991) problem-solving strategies might be suitable candidates
for local process-oriented strategies: they are individual and focus on
solving the problem at hand. Moreover, they are neutral in relation to the
product; the aim is simply to solve problems. With product-oriented
strategies the idea of global and local strategies seems intuitively plausible:
in a specific cultural situation, the best global strategy for translating a
children‟s book might be to domesticate. This global strategy might then
lead to preferring the use of cultural equivalents as local strategies to solve
individual translation problems.
3. Looking for a map
As the above survey clearly shows, “translation strategies” refer to a wide

variety of different translation-related phenomena. Can the different kinds
of strategies be related to each other? Table 1 is an attempt to provide a
“map” of different strategy notions. It should be noted that this is simply a
tentative sketch which does not take into account potential overlap or
missing elements, and therefore needs to be revised and refined. Table 1
proceeds from the socio-cultural context and the specifics of the translating
situation to the actual translation process, and the role and nature of
strategies. Below the strategy labels are tentative definitions and/or
examples of what those types of strategies might be.
As mentioned earlier, norms, at least the ones proposed by Toury
(1995), also seem to be closely related to some strategy notions. For
example, Venuti‟s (1998) strategies of translation include translation
policies, i.e., decisions about what to translate in particular socio-cultural
situations. This corresponds to Toury‟s preliminary norms. Product-
oriented global strategies, in turn, which refer to outlining a general
approach for a translation task in Table 1, seem to correspond to Toury‟s
initial norms. Finally, product-oriented local strategies seem to be related
to Toury‟s operational norms, which concern decisions made during the
act of translation. There are two kinds of operational norms; (a) matricial
norms: how much of the text is translated, changes in segmentation, e.g.

large-scale omissions; and b) textual-linguistic norms which concern the
selection of specific textual material to formulate the TT or replace
particular segments of the ST.
Table 1. A proposed map of different strategy notions
CONTEXT
- socio-cultural context: translation policy etc (Venuti 1998)
- details of the commission: who, what, for what purpose (Skopos) and for whom
GLOBAL STRATEGIES (MACROSTRATEGIES; Hönig 1991)

Process-oriented or procedural global Product-oriented or textual local strategies
strategies (Korhonen1998; Kearns 2008) (Korhonen1998; Kearns 2008)
- task-independent preferred modes - task-dependent general approaches
of action which guide subsequent local
strategies
- be consistent (Jääskeläinen 1999) - domesticating vs. foreignising
- translate without interruption as long - summarising
as possible & correct surface errors - interlinear translation for research
immediately but leave errors purposes
involving meaning until a natural - EU translation or multilingual
break (Séguinot 1989) drafting
LOCAL STRATEGIES (MICROSTRATEGIES; Hönig 1991)

Process-oriented or procedural local strategies Product-oriented or textual local strategies
(Korhonen1998; Kearns 2008) (Korhonen1998; Kearns 2008)
- Lörscher‟s (1991) individual - Lörscher‟s (1991) translation
problem-solving strategies methods (“tried and tested
(elements of strategies building up procedures”)
basic, expanded and complex - Leppihalme‟s (2001) and
structures) Chesterman‟s (1997) local strategies:
direct transfer, calque, paraphrase,
cultural adaptation, omission, etc.
TARGET TEXTS
4. Conclusion
We now have a rough idea what translation scholars talk about when they
discuss translation strategies. We also have a sketch of a map showing how
the different strategy notions might be related to each other. Obviously,
more work remains to be done. Often „translation strategies‟ are used
loosely, without any definitions, and the sense in which they are used can
only be deduced from the context. Furthermore, the ways in which and the
extent to which the strategy notions overlap is still not clear. And at this
point of my strategy-related musings it seems premature to suggest
standardisation of terminology or the replacement of some “strategies” by
e.g. policies or methods.
The theoretical survey of the different uses and definitions presented
here must be followed by a thorough empirical study to determine the
viability of the categories proposed and to identify what kind of process-
and product-related phenomena would qualify as one kind of strategy or
another. The research material for such a study should consist of process
and product data, including STs and TTs, translation briefs, keyboard logs,
verbalisations and observational data. Some strategic information will
appear in verbal reports, while others may only appear as consistent
patterns in TTs or keyboard logs, such as those created by Translog (e.g.
Jakobsen 1999, 2003).
References
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240–244.
Some thoughts about the evaluation of translation products
in empirical translation process research
Gyde Hansen
Abstract
In empirical studies of translation processes with a focus on combinations

of methods and a large variety of parameters and data, the parameter
“evaluation of the translation product” remains problematic and a source
of subjectivity, insecurity and bias. The question is if and how evaluation
criteria can be described, applied and documented rigorously, especially in
projects where it is claimed that product quality is a main parameter in
relation to the final result of the whole study.
Rigorous quality assessment requires transparent evaluation
procedures and criteria, and in projects involving process research, the
evaluation process easily develops into a complex project on its own.
1. Introduction
A fundamental requirement to empirical research is rigour, which means

solid, documented and comprehensible data and analyses that are
transparent to other scholars and can perhaps even be replicated. The
evaluation of translation products is just like the assessment of texts in
general, difficult and often subjective because of evaluators’ different
individual social and cultural backgrounds, their different ways of thinking,
different presuppositions, perceptions, preferences, styles and tastes.
Several questions have to be raised with respect to the selection of
evaluators, assessment criteria and procedures, and the weighting of results,
e.g.:
Who can be asked to evaluate the translation products? Is it
professional translators, colleagues from language and translation
departments, other experimenters in process research, students,
390 Gyde Hansen
bilinguals, native speakers of the target language, or perhaps clients

or representatives of the intended target text receivers?
Is it necessary to take into consideration the evaluators’ professional
and linguistic backgrounds, their qualifications, experience and
theoretical orientation?
How can misjudgement owing to cognitive constraints such as bad
memory, inconsistency or fatigue be avoided?
Should instructions for evaluation and/or the evaluation criteria be
given and discussed in advance?
Should evaluators be tested and trained in advance?
Should evaluators focus on errors only or should the evaluation be a
holistic one in which good solutions are taken into account as well?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of weighting errors and
grading quality in process research?
What is the role of the project leader/researcher in the evaluation
process, especially if he/she witnesses inconsistent assessment and/or
divergent evaluations?
2. Evaluation practices in translation process research
Different approaches have been adopted for the evaluation of translations in

translation process research. For research projects which aim at
investigating translator behaviour, attitudes or strategies that result in
good/useful translation products, an evaluation of the product is
indispensable, e.g. Krings (1986: 26ff), Jääskeläinen (1999: 110), Pacte
(2003: 43), Livbjerg/Mees (2003: 131), Hansen (1997, 1999, 2006a: 15)
and Tirkkonen-Condit (1991; 2005: 412). In some projects, because of the
issue investigated, an evaluation of the products is regarded as less
important, e.g. Jakobsen (2003), who investigated the effects of think aloud
on translation speed, revision and segmentation.
The development of Translog by Arnt Lykke Jakobsen and Lasse
Schou (1999) has improved process research considerably. With the
software, all keystrokes, changes and revisions during a translation process
can be registered and replayed. In addition to an evaluation of the final
product, the software makes it possible also to evaluate the quality of
Evaluation of translation products in translation process research 391
changes and revisions during the process, e.g. Livbjerg/Mees (1999, 2003)
and Hansen (2003, 2006a, 2008). In Hansen (2006a: 106f), this product
evaluation at a micro level is an important parameter.
In this article, evaluation of products refers to both, the evaluation of
final products and the product evaluation at a micro level.
3. Translation quality assessment in Translation Studies
In translation theory, translation practice and translator training, the

evaluation of translated texts is one of the most discussed issues (Lee-
Jahnke (2001: 259), Gerzymisch-Arbogast (2001: 237). Several issues of
journals like The Translator 6 (2), 2000, and Meta 46 (2), 2001, have been
devoted to this theme.
According to the purpose, different approaches to evaluation and
translation criticism, methods and theories can be found. Theoretically this
issue is discussed by, among others, Koller (1979), Reiß/Vermeer (1984),
Neubert/Shreve (1992), Vermeer (1996), Gerzymisch-Arbogast (1997,
2001, 2004), House (1997, 2001) and Kupsch-Losereit (2008). For
translation quality assessment for pedagogical purposes and for practical
professional translation, see, for example, Nord (1987, 1998), Pym (1992),
Hönig (1995), Kußmaul (1995), Stolze (1997), Schmitt (1998), Brunette
(2000), Waddington (2001), Ørsted (2001), Schubert (2004), Mertin
(2006), Mossop (2007a, 2007b), Künzli (2007), Magris (2009) and Hansen
(1999, 2006a, 2009).
Furthermore, a large variety of national and international norms and
standards of quality control defining translation processes and product
quality have been established, like DIN 2345, the ISO 9000 series, SAE
J2450, ÖNORM D1200 and D1201, ASTM F 2575 and the European EN
15038. They primarily apply to translation providers, translation companies
and can serve as a basis for certification of the translation processes. Some
of them, for instance, SAE J2450 and EN 15038, provide metrics or criteria
for assessment of the quality of translation products. Stejskal (2009: 297)
gives a description and comparison of existing standards and their
applications. With respect to product evaluation, Stejskal (2009: 298)
mentions that in industry-specific standards it is the end user who dictates
what a “quality translation” is.
392 Gyde Hansen
Depending on the purpose of the assessment, different requirements

have to be met by the evaluators. In professional situations, sometimes the
evaluation is restricted to an intuitive assessment by the client or by a
representative of the group of end users. They evaluate the target text
without any previous information or knowledge, and this seems to be
sufficient (Ørsted 2001: 443). In other cases, meticulous translation
criticism is asked for and metrics for assessment of the quality are
developed (Mertin 2006).
4. Usability and acceptability of texts
As described in Hansen (2007), the purpose of translation quality

assessment and the individual perception of quality in a communication
situation differ considerably. Schmitt (1998: 394) mentions that quality in
translation depends on the receivers’ defined expectations and the adequacy
of the product or service in relation to these expectations. Expectations,
requirements and receivers’ needs are stipulated by the translation brief, i.e.
the communicative situation and the context in which the target text is
used. The acceptability of a target text, however, depends on the target text
receiver’s perception of what is desirable in a particular situation, and
individual tolerance levels regarding errors seem to be quite different.
Apart from the term “acceptability”, a good term in this connection is
usability of a text.
We can never be sure that there is a direct relationship between the
quality and the perceived usability of a text. There are communicative
situations where poor quality seems to be welcome and even turns out to be
an advantage, whereas, in other communicative situations, errors are
absolutely unacceptable. The following two examples illustrate these two
extreme cases.
An empirical investigation of the effect of flawed tourist brochures
by Riis Christensen (1997), who asked 83 German tourists on the beaches
of Jutland (Denmark) about their opinion of these brochures, showed that
the tourists simply loved to read the brochures. They were amused by the
deficient language. The flaws even confirmed their expectations, and made
them feel being on holiday in a naïve, little, relaxed country. The
communication between Danish tourist agencies and the German tourists
served the purpose perfectly – despite the extremely high number of errors
in the translated brochures. An example:
(1) « Fisch- und krustentierabend »

In die Saison haben Wir ein ganz spezielles Abend, Mittwoch. Sie können Sich
von einem Fischtisch, mit 15 – 20 Spezialiteten bedienen. Dkr 168,00
(Frei/Samstag im Ostern)
An example at the other end of the scale of acceptability and usability is a

translation into German of an official Danish website, namely the
presentation of the Danish Language Council (Dansk Sprognævn), which
shows many linguistic and functional errors. As the sender was an official
language institution and the receivers expected a flawless text, the
translation was completely unacceptable. The following example, a human
translation of the Danish source text, was accessed in 2006:
(2) Art des Instituts: Kulturministerieller Institution. Dänische Kulturministerium.

Der Rat ist ein nationales Gremium des Kulturministeriums und hat in der
Humanistischen Fakultät, Universität Kopenhagen, zu Hause.
These two examples represent extreme ends of the scale but, depending on
the communication situation and receivers’ expectations, in between these
two opposite sides there are several degrees of usability and acceptability.
Interestingly, the same website accessed in September 2009 offers a
machine translation into German which does not make much sense. At
present, however, it is this kind of nonsense we expect when we touch
“Übersetzen”.
It is not always easy clearly to draw the borderline between
“linguistic errors” or “language errors” (e.g. wrong choices as to grammar
and vocabulary) and “translation errors” or “functional errors” (i.e. flaws
that may have a negative influence on the reception of the message in the
communicative situation, as stated by, among others, Pym (1992: 279ff.),
Kußmaul (1995: 129ff), Waddington (2001: 314) and Martínez
Melis/Hurtado Albir (2001: 281). The difficulty lies in the fact that
grammatical and lexical errors usually have an immediate impact on the
acceptability in the communication situation because the readers’ attention
is automatically directed towards them. Umbreit (2001: 253), for example,
394 Gyde Hansen
has observed that linguistic errors affect the way a message is received
because readers lose confidence in the text and cannot take it seriously.
5. The choice of evaluators
Systematic evaluation of translation products presupposes insight in the

evaluators’ profiles, i.e. their translation theoretical orientation, cognitive
competences, attitudes and taste. The evaluators’ orientation also has to be
seen in relation to the theoretical orientation and attitudes of the
translators/subjects. It is crucial to be aware of the relationship between
quality assessment and the assessor’s attitudes to functional translation,
fidelity, loyalty, ethics, equivalence, norms, acceptability and the usability
of translated texts because it is this relationship which has the most
important impact on every assessment. For example, in relation to addition
or omission of information, depending on the theoretical orientation, these
strategies are regarded as welcome by some evaluators and criticised as
errors by others.
The question as to whether the evaluators are bilingual or
monolingual, and whether the target text is written in their mother tongue
or in (one of) their foreign language(s) seems to affect their tolerance levels
– mainly with respect to linguistic errors, but also with respect to their
awareness of functional or pragmatic aspects. There seems to be a
difference between evaluations by bilingual and non-bilingual evaluators,
an observation, however, that would need to be investigated empirically.
Notably, in the case of translations of domain-specific texts, the specialist
background of the evaluator is crucial.
The best-case scenario is for several competent evaluators to
undertake a consensus-oriented assessment, so that bias as a result of
individual subjectivity can be reduced. “Competent” here means having the
ability not only to spot errors but also to describe and explain the
assessment criteria and to justify the decisions made.
As mentioned earlier in this article, a type of evaluation used by
some translation companies is client assessment by the end users or by
potential target text receivers. An advantage of this approach, in which the
target text is often evaluated without access to the source text, is that we
obtain the target text receivers’ spontaneous, subjective reactions regarding
the usability of the text. However, a study I carried out (Hansen 1999: 57)
has shown that these evaluations without the source text are not reliable.
Assessments of this type can perhaps be useful as a supplement to other
evaluations. In translation process research, they are problematical, not
only because they are carried out without the source text but also because
the potential receivers often do not have the necessary concepts at their
disposal to explain and justify their observations and assessments.
Obviously, one has to be trained in the evaluation and revision of
(translated) texts (Hansen 2008, 2009).
5.1 Cognitive aspects
As in other situations where texts are evaluated, inconsistency is also a

problem in translation quality assessment for translation process research.
Evaluators do not always spot identical errors in different products, or they
evaluate them differently. It even happens that the same evaluator assesses
an identical product (by the same translator) differently a week after the
first evaluation (Pavlović 2005). Such inconsistencies can be due to fatigue
and/or decreased attention. Some evaluators admit that they get used to the
errors and that they become more tolerant the more translations they read.
That is why evaluators sometimes insist on reading only one or two
products a day, so that they can be as “objective as possible” – as one of my
evaluators (Hansen 1999: 51) expressed it. As inconsistency and fatigue
seem to be proportional to the number of products evaluated, the texts can
perhaps be presented to the evaluators in different orders.
5.2 The role of the researcher in the evaluation process
An important question is if researchers should evaluate the translation

products themselves or if they should merely rely on the assessments of an
appointed group of evaluators in order to avoid bias from observers’
interests. In my experience, it is an advantage if researchers also evaluate
the translation products themselves since it is then easier to control what is
very often a complicated evaluation process, especially if there are
discrepancies between the evaluators’ assessments. Observers’ influence
and bias can be minimized by a precise description of divergences between
the evaluations and the criteria applied. Product evaluations at a micro level
396 Gyde Hansen
which draw on translation process data can be difficult because one has to
be trained in reading log files. They should be carried out by the researcher
or a competent colleague, but also in accordance with the criteria the
evaluators have agreed on.
6. Grading errors and ranking quality
Even if evaluators agree on the quality criteria, they may still have different
ideas about errors and their gravity. One problem in this connection is the
lack of agreement there may be among evaluators on the units or linguistic
entities assessed. This has an impact on a consistent analysis and
interpretation of the data. In the case of unwarranted omissions, for
example, notably in process research under time pressure (Hansen 2006b),
it has to be taken into account that evaluators make their judgements using
different entities. Some count every missing word as one error while others
are more tolerant and work with larger entities. For process research, it is
crucial to discuss this problem with the evaluators and to reach an
agreement.
A fundamental question is whether it is only errors that should be
registered and evaluated or whether holistic evaluations are needed in
which good translation solutions are taken into consideration (see Martínez
Melis/Hurtado Albir 2001). In the latter case, we would need precise
criteria for “good” translations since statements like “fluent”, “partly
fluent” or “easy to read” (e.g. Jääskeläinen 1999: 112) depend on
individual, subjective perception.
There are several approaches to holistic descriptions, e.g.
Gerzymisch-Arbogast (2001: 230ff; 2004: 69ff) who suggests that
network-based parameters of coherence and thematic and isotopic patterns
are included in the catalogue of evaluation criteria. Williams (2001)
proposes the application of argument macrostructures complementary to
other approaches of translation quality assessment based on the theory of
argumentation by Toulmin (1964).
However, for translation process research, the situation is still that
good translation solutions are assessed differently by different evaluators
and that there is a lack of reliable procedures for holistic assessment,
because not only “good” or “successful” would have to be clearly defined

but also the weight of good solutions in relation to flaws and errors.
In many projects, in order to get an overview, ranking levels such as
“good”, “acceptable” or “not acceptable” are used (Hansen/Hönig 2000).
However, as Gerzymisch Arbogast (1997: 576) points out, these scales and
their ranks also need to be defined and properly described.
7. Instructions, preliminary definitions, draft translations
One way of dealing with the above-mentioned problems and avoiding the
risk of bias would perhaps be to give the evaluators predefined criteria and
guidelines prior to their assessment. Martínez Melis/Hurtado Albir (2001:
283) mention several kinds of evaluation, “intuitive assessment” without
criteria and “reasoned assessment” with objective criteria.
If evaluators are not given the criteria to be applied, they will use
their own criteria. However, if they receive predefined criteria and
guidelines from the researcher, the results may lack validity because of
potential bias from the researchers’ interests. Waddington (2001)
investigated evaluation processes in which the evaluators not only got
precise criteria in advance but were also trained in how to apply them. One
of the results of his study was that this method seemed to augment
criterion-related validity (2001: 322ff).
A procedure I would like to propose is an interaction between an
individual spontaneous assessment according to the evaluators’ own norms
followed by a description of the criteria applied by them and a discussion
of their results. They have to be able to describe problems encountered
during the evaluation process and to justify their decisions. As a next step,
the individual problems, decisions and results could be compared and an
agreement reached on a set of shared quality criteria which are
subsequently applied systematically to all the translation products (Hansen
2006a: 112). During the dialogue, different theoretical orientations,
attitudes and ideas can be clarified and an agreement can be reached.
The evaluators can also be asked to try to solve the translation task
themselves. This increases their sensitivity to special characteristics of the
source text and potential translation problems (Hansen 1996: 156). In
addition, they become more alert to other translators’ good, acceptable or
398 Gyde Hansen
poor proposals. It is easier to recognize and describe good formulations

when they can be compared with other formulations which are either
linguistically and stylistically neutral or not successful.
8. Conclusion: transparent and comprehensible evaluation procedures
Because of the general insecurity with respect to the grading of good

translations, holistic procedures and especially a weighting of good
solutions against errors is not reliable. Consequently, I would like to
propose the following two assessment procedures which are based on
documented and described errors: a systematic evaluation and a
spontaneous evaluation. Criteria and errors are described in both
procedures and the results are transparent and comprehensible.
The systematic evaluation is an evaluation of the errors in a
translation product all the evaluators have agreed on after a discussion of
the criteria, problems and divergences. After they have reached agreement,
the criteria are applied systematically and identically to all the translation
products in the study. Similar errors have to be dealt with in exactly the
same manner in all texts wherever they occur. This procedure can be
regarded as a relatively precise evaluation method, but it is extremely time-
consuming. An advantage of the systematic evaluation in process research
with Translog is that the same catalogue of criteria can also be used for
product evaluation at a micro level.
The spontaneous evaluation is an assessment of quality based only
on those errors all evaluators spot and agree upon spontaneously. With this
procedure, there is no discussion, but the researcher can ask the evaluators
to provide a precise description of the criteria applied. This evaluation
seems to be reliable; however as it is based on the means of errors and
flaws, errors which are marked by only one of the evaluators are neglected.
The reliability of the spontaneous method to a high degree depends on the
evaluators’ background, attitudes and qualifications with respect to quality
assessment.
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Notes on contributors
Fabio Alves is Professor of Translation Studies and a researcher of LETRA, the

Laboratory for Experimentation in Translation, at the Federal University of
Minas Gerais (Brazil). He holds a PhD from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum
(Germany) with a process-oriented study of cognitive differences and similarities
observed among Brazilian and Portuguese translators. His current research
focuses primarily on the empirical-experimental investigation of the translation
process as well as on the development of expertise in translation. His
publications include articles in Meta, Journal of Translation Studies, TradTerm
and Cadernos de Tradução as well as book chapters in the Benjamins Translation
Library.
E-mail: fabio-alves@ufmg.br
Laura Winther Balling is Assistant Professor of experimental psycholinguistics

and translation at the Department of International Language Studies and
Computational Linguistics, CBS. Within psycholinguistics, her main focus is on
word recognition, while her interest in translation focuses on translation
processes. She has a strong interest in experimental data analysis and statistics.
Laura Winther Balling holds a PhD in psycholinguistics from the University of
Aarhus.
E-mail: lwb.isv@cbs.dk
Webpage: www.cbs.dk/staff/lwb
Matthias Buch-Kromann (born 1972) is Associate Professor in

computational linguistics at the Department of International Language
Studies and Computational Linguistics at the Copenhagen Business School.
His research interests include dependency treebanks, parsing,
statistical language modelling and machine translation. He was the
principal investigator in the Danish Dependency Treebank project and the
Danish-English Parallel Dependency Treebank project. In 2006 he obtained a
Danish doctorate at CBS (dr.ling.merc.) for a dissertation on dependency-based
computer models of human parsing and language learning.
E-mail: mbk.isv@cbs.dk
Michael Carl was appointed as Associate Professor in the Department of

International Language Studies and Computational Linguistics at the
404 Notes on contributors
Copenhagen Business School in 2008. His current research interests are related
to the investigation of human translation processes and interactive machine
translation. Prior to his position in Denmark, he was employed at the Institut für
Angewandte Informationsforschung (IAI) in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he
carried out research on machine translation, terminology tools, and the
implementation of natural language processing software, mainly for extending
and maintaining IAI’s Controlled Language Authoring Tool (CLAT). He has
published more than 60 reviewed articles in journals and international conference
proceedings, and is the editor of a reference book on example-based machine
translation.
E-mail: mc.isv@cbs.dk
Andrew Chesterman was born in England but moved to Finland in 1968 and
has been based there ever since, at the University of Helsinki, where he has
mostly taught English and translation theory. His current position is in the
Department of General Linguistics, where he is professor of multilingual
communication. His main research interests are in contrastive analysis,
translation theory, translation norms and ethics, and translator training. He was
CETRA Professor in 1999 (Catholic University of Leuven), and has an honorary
doctorate from the Copenhagen Business School. Main books: On Definiteness
(1991, CUP), Memes of Translation (1997, Benjamins); Contrastive
Functional Analysis (1998, Benjamins); with Emma Wagner: Can Theory
Help Translators? A Dialogue between the Ivory Tower and the Wordface (2002,
St. Jerome Publishing); and with Jenny Williams: The Map. A Beginners’ Guide
to Doing Research in Translation Studies (2002, St. Jerome Publishing).
E-mail: chesterm@mappi.helsinki.fi
Barbara Dragsted has a PhD in translation from the Copenhagen Business

School, Department of International Language Studies and Computational
Linguistics, where she is currently employed as an assistant professor teaching
translation. She is involved in different research projects under the Center for
Research and Innovation in Translation and Translation Techno-logy. Her
research interests include cognitive processes in translation, translation
technology, terminology and knowledge sharing, and translation and
interpretation hybrids. She has worked as a freelance translator since 1999.
Email: bd.isv@cbs.dk
Birgitta Englund Dimitrova holds a PhD in Slavic linguistics from Stockholm

University. She has been a Lecturer of Bulgarian and of Interpreting and
Notes on contributors 405
Translation; since 2006 she has been Full Professor of Interpreting and
Translation Studies at Stockholm University. She has published widely on Slavic
linguistics, and on translation and interpretation theory, practice and didactics.
Recent works include the monograph Expertise and Explicitation in the
Translation Process, published by Benjamins in 2005, and the co-editing of the
proceedings from the conference “Critical Link 4”. She is a member of the
advisory board of several international journals in Translation Studies.
Email: birgitta.englund@tolk.su.se
Dorrit Faber is Associate Professor in the Department of International Language

Studies and Computational Linguistics at the Copenhagen Business School,
where she teaches specialised communication and translation, in particular
English-Danish and Danish-English translation within the domains of law and
business economics. Her research interests include translation studies and
translation process research focusing in particular on the translation of legal
texts. With Mette Hjort-Pedersen she is currently involved in a project on the
phenomena of explicitation and implicitation in legal translation.
E-mail: df.isv@cbs.dk
Susanne Göpferich is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of

Graz/Austria. From 1997 to 2003 she was Professor of Technical Communi-
cation and Documentation at the Karlsruhe University of Applied
Sciences/Germany. Her main fields of research comprise text linguistics,
specialized communication and translation, comprehensibility research, technical
writing, translation theory and didactics, as well as translation process research,
which is the topic of her most recent book Translationsprozessforschung: Stand –
Methoden – Perspektiven. Tübingen: Narr, 2008, and the longitudinal study
TransComp.
Website: www.susanne-goepferich.de
E-mail: susanne.goepferich@uni-graz.at
Gyde Hansen, professor dr. habil., has taught at the Copenhagen Business
School since 1978 in the disciplines: comparative linguistics, text linguistics,
intercultural communication, semiotics and marketing, translation theory and
practice, translation revision, philosophy of science and empirical research
methods. Since 2004, she has been Vice President of EST (European Society for
Translation Studies). Her research projects include: TRAP (Translation processes,
from 1996-2002), the Copenhagen Retrospection Project (2004), a longitudinal
study From Student to Expert (1996-2008) and, currently, TraREdit (2008–), an

investigation of quality in translation and revision processes.
Email: gh.isv@cbs.dk
Inge Gorm Hansen is Associate Professor in the Department of International

Language Studies and Computational Linguistics at the Copenhagen Business
School. She teaches interpreting and intercultural communication and is a
practising translator and interpreter. She is currently involved in research projects
in the Center for Research and Innovation in Translation and Translation
Technology. Her research interests include interpreting, language technology,
terminology and knowledge sharing, and the study of translation workflows in
multilingual communication.
Email: igh.isv@cbs.dk
Mette Hjort-Pedersen is Associate Professor in the Department of International

School. She teaches legal translation and business communication. Her main
fields of research comprise legal communication and translation, translation
theory, translation processes and lexical semantics. With Dorrit Faber she is
currently involved in a project on the phenomena of explicitation and
implicitation in legal translation.
E-mail: mhp.isv@cbs.dk
Riitta Jääskeläinen is Professor of English (translation and interpreting) at the

University of Joensuu (as of 1 January 2010, University of Eastern Finland).
Translation process research has been her main area of research since her MA
thesis in 1987. Her PhD thesis Tapping the Process was published in 1999. She
has published several articles and co-edited three volumes focusing on process
studies; two with Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit (Tapping and Mapping the Processes
of Translation and Interpreting, John Benjamins 2000; and a special issue of
ACROSS Languages and Cultures 2002) and one with Susanne Göpferich
(special issue of ACROSS Languages and Cultures 2009/2).
Email: Riitta.Jaaskelainen@joensuu.fi
Kristian T. H. Jensen is currently working on his PhD on cognitive effort in

translation at Copenhagen Business School, using eye-tracking and key-logging
to collect data. His research interests include cognitive processes in translation,
audio-visual translation, and human-computer interaction. In the spring of 2009,
he spent four months at Dublin City University (School of Applied Language and
Intercultural Studies) as part of his PhD project. He has worked as a freelance

translator since 2003.
E-mail: kthj.isv@cbs.dk
Moshe Koppel received B.A. and M.A. degrees in mathematics from Yeshiva
University and a Ph.D. in mathematics from New York University. He was a
post-doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and is
currently on the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at Bar-Ilan
University in Israel. His research focuses mainly on machine learning, especially
text-related applications. He has run a successful stock-trading strategy at a
hedge fund and has served as chief technological consultant and chief scientist of
a number of Internet companies. He has also written two books on Jewish law
and serves as an advisor to Israel’s Knesset on constitutional law.
E-mail: moishk@gmail.com
Iørn Korzen is professor of Italian and responsible for Italian Studies at the
Copenhagen Business School (CBS). He holds an MA in Italian Language and
Literature from Copenhagen University and a Danish doctorate on the Italian
article system from CBS. He is the author of more than 100 publications on
Italian and typological linguistics; during the last 10 years his main focus has
been on discourse structure and anaphoric relations from a contrastive Romance
– Germanic perspective, with special reference to Italian and Danish. He is a
member of Società Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Italiana, of which
he was President from 2002 to 2004.
E-mail: ik.ikk@cbs.dk
Paul Kußmaul, Ph.D. (Bristol), was a Senior Lecturer at the Department of

Applied Linguistics and Cultural Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg University
in Mainz (Germany), and retired in 2005. He trained translators and published
extensively on translation. His most recent books are Verstehen und Übersetzen
(Narr 2007) and Übersetzen – nicht leicht gemacht (Saxa 2009). He has guest
lectured in Argentina, Austria, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, England,
Finland, Greece, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Thailand and
Turkey. Kußmaul was a founding board member (1992–1995) of the European
Society for Translation Studies. He has translated scholarly books and articles,
poetry, and social surveys.
E-mail: PKussmaul@aol.com
Brenda Malkiel has the distinction of being the first scholar to use Translog in a
study of Hebrew–English translation. She has published three articles about what
Translog can teach us about the translation process: “Directionality and
Translational Difficulty” (Perspectives), “The Effect of Translator Training on
Interference and Difficulty” (Target), and “From Ántonia to My Ántonia:
Tracking Self-corrections with Translog” (Copenhagen Studies in Language).
Recent publications include “Teaching Translation in the Hebrew Language
Program” (Issues in the Acquisition and Teaching of Hebrew), “Translation as a
Decision Process: Evidence from Cognates” (Babel), and the autobiographical
“This Is Love” (All of Our Lives).
E-mail: brendamalkiel@gmail.com
Inger M. Mees read English at Leiden and Edinburgh and obtained her doctorate
and first university appointment at Leiden. In 1985 she took up her post as
Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School specialising in English
phonetics and pronunciation. Together with Inge Livbjerg, she has published
research on dictionary use in translation employing think-aloud protocols. With
Beverley Collins, she has co-authored Phonetics of English and Dutch (Brill,
1996), The Real Professor Higgins: The Life and Career of Daniel Jones
(Mouton de Gruyter, 1999). Recent work includes Practical Phonetics and
Phonology, (Routledge, 2008), and editing Daniel Jones’s Selected Works, 8 vols,
(Routledge 2003) and Phonetics of English in the Nineteenth Century, 7 vols,
Routledge 2006).
Email: im.isv@cbs.dk
Henrik Høeg Müller is Associate Professor in the Department of International

School, and holds a PhD and a Danish Doctorate in Spanish linguistics. His
research interests include natural language syntax and semantics with a special
focus on Spanish noun phrase structure, nominal compounding, determination,
modal auxiliaries, language typology and, more recently, also treebanks and
machine translation. Henrik Høeg Müller teaches Spanish linguistics and
translation, philosophy of science, European studies and language for specific
purposes (LSP).
Email: hhm.isv@cbs.dk
Ricardo Muñoz has been a freelance translator since 1987. He graduated in

English Studies (Univ. Valencia) and Translation and Interpreting (Univ.
Granada), and was awarded a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics at UC Berkeley back
in 1993. Muñoz coordinates the research efforts of the group Expertise and
Environment in Translation (PETRA, Spanish acronym). His main research focus
is on the interface between cognitive science and empirical research of
translation processes. Muñoz is an associate professor of translation at the
University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
E-mail: rmunoz@dfm.ulpgc.es
Sharon O’Brien is a PhD and a lecturer in Translation Studies at Dublin City

University (DCU). Her primary research interests include Machine Translation,
Controlled Language, Post-Editing, Translation Technology and Localisation.
She is a Principal Investigator in the Centre for Next Generation Localisation, as
well as a member of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies at DCU. She
has received research funding from the Irish Research Council for the
Humanities and Social Sciences, Enterprise Ireland, Science Foundation Ireland
and the Austrian Government. She worked as a language technology consultant
in the localisation industry for several years. Her teaching centres around French
and German specialised translation, localisation, translation theory, research
methods and interpreting.
Email: Sharon.OBrien@dcu.ie
Noam Ordan graduated from the Interdisciplinary Program for Fostering

Excellence at Tel Aviv University, where he focused on the philosophy of
science. As part of this pursuit, he has published in computational linguistics and
helped found WordNet for Hebrew. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the
Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at Bar-Ilan University. His
main interest lies in using computational approaches to language in order to
challenge theories of language use, especially with regard to translated texts.
Email: noam.ordan@googlemail.com
Adriana Pagano is Professor of Translation Studies at Universidade Federal de

Minas Gerais, Brazil. She is a researcher at the Laboratory for Experimentation
in Translation, and supervises MA theses and PhD dissertations at the Graduate
Program in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Faculdade de Letras/UFMG.
She is currently working on systemic-functional modelling of the translation
process based on data gathered in experimental research on translation.
Email: apagano@ufmg.br
Franz Pöchhacker is Associate Professor of Interpreting Studies in the Center

for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna. He holds Master’s degrees in
conference interpreting from the University of Vienna and from the Monterey
Institute of International Studies, and has been working freelance as a conference
and media interpreter since the late 1980s. Following his doctoral research on
simultaneous conference interpreting, he has worked on community-based
interpreting in healthcare and asylum settings as well as on general issues of
interpreting studies as a discipline. He is the author of Introducing Interpreting
Studies (Routledge, 2004) and co-editor of the journal Interpreting.
Email: franz.poechhacker@univie.ac.at
Anthony Pym is Director of the Intercultural Studies Group at the Rovira i

Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain. He coordinates a Masters in Specialized
Translation, a research Masters in Translation and Intercultural Studies, and a
doctoral program in Translation and Intercultural Studies, for all of which he
must perennially devise lists of competencies. In 2008 he was on sabbatical at the
Monterey Institute of International Studies. He has written, edited or co-edited
some 17 books and 130 articles in the general field of translation and
intercultural studies.
E-mail: anthony.pym@urv.net
Lasse Schou is a software architect and business entrepreneur with several

software products and business start-ups behind him. He holds a Master in
Computer Science from the Technical University of Copenhagen. Lasse has been
the main programmer of the Translog software since 1995 and participated
actively in the three-year Eye-to-IT project, during which Translog was
integrated into both eye-tracking and EEG measuring software.
E-mail: ls@lco-aps.dk
Miriam Shlesinger holds an honorary doctorate from the Copenhagen Business

School. Although most of her past research centered on cognitive processes in
simultaneous interpreting, her recent interests also include two new directions:
healthcare interpreting and the application of corpus-linguistic methods to the
analysis of translators’ and interpreters’ outputs, and it is in this context that her
recent corpus-based research has been conducted. In addition to her research
pursuits, she is an active translator of Israeli literature and a conference
interpreter, and has been teaching written translation, interpreting and translation
theory in the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies of Bar-Ilan
University since 1978.
E-mail: shlesm@mail.biu.ac.il
Igor Antônio Lourenço da Silva has an MA in Translation Studies from

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, where he is currently
working on his PhD on the impact of domain knowledge upon the translation
process, using eye tracking, key logging, screen recording, and retrospection to
collect data. His research interests include cognitive processes in translation, eye
tracking, and translation expertise. He is currently affiliated with LETRA, the
Laboratory for Experimentation in Translation at UFMG, and with the
EXPERT@ project, which investigates the impact of expertise-related variables
upon the cognitive process of translators and non-translators.
E-mail: ialsigor@gmail.com
Henrik Selsøe Sørensen is Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School

in the Department of International Culture and Communication Studies, where he
teaches LSP translation, French–Danish and Danish–French translation, machine
translation, and Internet and databases. His research interests include
Multilingual Knowledge Engineering, Terminology and Machine Translation – in
particular for Law Enforcement purposes. Since 2007 he has worked on various
aspects of food label communication in the Danish project FairSpeak
(http://www.fairspeak.org).
Email: hss.ikk@cbs.dk
Annette C. Sjørup is a PhD student at Copenhagen Business School. Her MA

thesis was on marriage metaphors in American and Danish news articles about
company mergers. Her PhD project focuses on professional translators’ cognitive
processing patterns in a metaphor translation task. The aim is to identify eye
movement patterns that can be associated with processing of non-literal
language. Her research interests include cognitive linguistics, eye-tracking, and
all aspects of metaphor identification, comprehension, and translation. She has
worked as a freelance translator since 2005.
E-mail: acs.isv@cbs.dk
Elisabet Tiselius is a trained conference interpreter accredited to the European

institutions, with an M.A in Conference Interpreting from the University of
Mons-Hainaut, Belgium. She is currently a PhD student at the Department of
Foreign Languages, University of Bergen, Norway, and the Centre for Research
on Bilingualism, Stockholm University, Sweden, writing a PhD thesis on the
development of expertise in conference interpreting.
E-mail: e.tiselius@gmail.com

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CONTENTS

Foreword by Finn Junge-Jensen .................................................................. xi

Arnt Lykke Jakobsen

Part I: Methodological issues

Part II: Computer assistance in process research

Part III: Eye-tracking

Part IV: Precision, strategies and quality assessment

On 27 December, 2009, Arnt Lykke Jakobson will celebrate his 65th

Part I: Methodological issues

The first section comprises five contributions on methodological issues in

The section begins with Andrew Chesterman‟s explanation of why he

dialogue or debate. The paper is interspersed with parallels drawn between

Franz Pöchhacker gives a broad perspective of methodologies in the field

Ricardo Muñoz Martín argues that research into translation processes

Another methodological paper is that authored by Birgitta Englund

(7 Chinese, 5 Korean, 1 Japanese, 6 French) participated in three

Part II: Computer assistance in process research

Susanne Göpferich‟s article shows how electronic systems can be used to

Miriam Shlesinger, Moshe Koppel, Noam Ordan and Brenda Malkiel

consisted of 273 samples of literary prose translated into English from 12

Matthias Buch-Kromann, Iørn Korzen and Henrik Høeg Müller are

Part III: Eye-tracking

The third section comprises four papers dealing with eye-tracking.

Sharon O’Brien addresses methodological matters in translation process

Fabio Alves, Adriana Pagano and Igor da Silva conducted a study

Barbara Dragsted, Inge Gorm Hansen and Henrik Selsøe Sørensen

Kristian TH Jensen, Annette Sjørup and Laura Winther Balling

Part IV: Precision, strategies and quality assessment

Our last section comprises four articles on precision in translation, the

Dorrit Faber and Mette Hjort-Pedersen adopt an interesting approach to

Paul Kußmaul elaborates on “the principle of the necessary degree of

Riitta Jääskeläinen discusses the difficult concept of “translation

The final paper in this volume, authored by Gyde Hansen, serves as a

The editors wish to thank Finn Junge-Jensen, former President of the

Copenhagen, Belo Horizonte and Graz, October 2009 The Editors

Early years at the university

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

Research interests: literature, text analysis and semantics

Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole

So Arnt Lykke Jakobsen‟s early years as a researcher were devoted to

effortlessly reproduces speakers‟ voice qualities. His co-authorship of a

The move to CBS: from literature to translation

Computers and corpora

Many critics, no defenders,

any other words in combination; in Jakobsen (*1996) he discusses the

LSP translation and first major project

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word

The teaching of translation

oriented approach should be adopted in translation training, and use should

Definition of the concept of translation

Jakobsen (*1994b) concerns theories of translation types, discussing

The OFT project can be regarded as Arnt‟s apprenticeship in

five above-mentioned subprojects (*1994a). It was a brave undertaking,

Head of department and administrative tasks

that “think aloud” cannot be taken to be a direct manifestation of the

During the OFT project, Jakobsen had been considering ways of

intended as a research tool, it also turned out to be popular as an

out to be in addition a useful learning aid but it can also probably be

The effect of thinking aloud on the translation process

Hans Krings‟s (2001) magnum opus on the processes involved in post-

In December 2000, Jakobsen‟s achievements were recognised when he was

specifically how pauses might potentially indicate a cognitive rhythm. This

Centre of excellence in 2005 and professorship in 2007