Abstracts
Abstract
Three eye tracking experiments test the hypothesis that translation involves parallel rather than sequential processing of the source and target texts. In Experiment 1, a group of professional translators translated texts from their native language Danish into English. The texts included both segments where the order of verb and subject was congruent between source and target text and segments that were non-congruent. Translators gazed significantly longer at the non-congruent segments of the source text, indicating that the structure of the target text is anticipated during source text reading. Two follow-up experiments on first and second language reading demonstrate that this congruence effect in translation is not the result of the non-congruent Danish segments being inherently more difficult than the congruent ones and that the effect is not a general effect in bilingual reading. We conclude that translation is a parallel process and that literal translation is likely to be a universal initial default strategy in translation. This conclusion is strengthened by the fact that all three experiments were relatively naturalistic, due to the combination of remote eye tracking and mixed-effects regression modeling.
Keywords:
- translation processes,
- eye tracking,
- parallel/sequential processing,
- syntactic transfer,
- L1 and L2 reading
Résumé
Dans trois études oculométriques, nous testons l’hypothèse selon laquelle la traduction suppose un traitement parallèle plutôt que séquentiel des textes source et cible. Dans la première étude, un groupe de traducteurs professionnels ont traduit vers l’anglais des textes rédigés dans leur langue maternelle, c’est-à-dire le danois. Les textes comprenaient aussi bien des segments où l’ordre verbe/sujet était le même entre texte source et texte cible que des segments où l’ordre était différent. Nous avons relevé que les traducteurs regardaient plus longtemps les segments où l’ordre verbe/sujet différait entre les deux textes, ce qui indique une anticipation de la structure du texte cible dès la lecture du texte source. Nos deux études ultérieures sur la lecture en langue maternelle et en langue seconde démontrent deux choses : d’une part, l’ordre des mots en traduction ne découle pas du fait que les segments danois dont l’ordre diffère sont plus difficiles que les segments dont l’ordre est identique. D’autre part, cet effet n’est pas généralisé dans la lecture bilingue. Cela nous permet de conclure que la traduction est un processus parallèle et que la traduction littérale est probablement la stratégie de traduction par défaut. Cette conclusion est soutenue par le fait que les trois études étaient menées dans un cadre relativement naturel grâce à l’utilisation d’un système d’oculométrie et à une modélisation de régression à effets mixtes.
Mots-clés :
- processus de traduction,
- oculométrie,
- traitement séquentiel/parallèle,
- transfert syntaxique,
- lecture en L1 et en L2
Appendices
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