Pauses as indicators of cognitive effort in post-editing machine translation output

摘要

In translation process and language production research, pauses are seen as indicators of cognitive processing. Investigating the correlations between source text machine translatability and post-editing effort involves an assessment of cognitive effort. Therefore, an analysis of pauses is essential. This paper presents data from a research project which includes an analysis of pauses in post-editing, triangulated with the Choice Network Analysis method and Translog. Results suggest that the pause-to-keyboarding ratio does not differ significantly for sentences deemed to be more suitable for machine translation than for those deemed to be less suitable. Also, results confirm the finding in research elsewhere that pause duration and frequency is subject to individual differences. Finally, we suggest that while pauses provide some indication of cognitive processing, supplementary methods are required to give a fuller picture.