Placing the reading task for sight translation under the microscope then, it may be reasonable to speculate that all factors affecting reading for comprehension will hold true in the circumstance of reading for sight translation, since the latter is still a kind of reading. Furthermore, we can fairly expect the full force of factors that impact bilingual reading, firstly because all interpreters performing sight translation are necessarily versed in two languages to acquire information written in one language and orally translate it in another. Secondly, the fact that reformulation is involved in sight translation means the activation of both languages in rapid succession is a must, but non-selectivity might still need be avoided for efficient reading. This conscious control will inevitably consume the interpreter’s limited cognitive resources.
Although we might not see cognate or homograph effects in the language combination of Chinese and English (the symbols used being highly dissimilar), as exemplified by de Groot (2013), other agents, such as the fundamental differences of syntactic rules, may still assert their presence. On top of the possible influence of bilingual reading, what may further complicate the situation is that reformulation and production in a different language is required for sight translation. This means
activated linguistic information in either language might have to be suppressed quickly in one stage and deliberately solicited in another stage if interpreters are to smoothly produce oral renditions.
Will the intricate mechanism required by sight translation alter the behavior of input reception (reading), differentiating reading for sight translation from reading for comprehension? In fact, previous studies have reported rather mixed assertions. In a sight translation task (referred to as simultaneous translation in the paper), McDonald and Carpenter (1981) designed garden-path sentences, each embedded in an 85-word context, to see how two translation experts and two amateur German-English
bilinguals read and parse the stimuli. The authors held that reading for sight translation resembles reading for comprehension because eye movement measures collected from their study showed that participants first read silently to understand the sentences and then began reformulation during the second pass of reading.
Shreve, Schäffner, Danks, and Griffin (1993) reached a similar conclusion with their experiment. Three groups of participants were involved. The first group, consisting of ten graduate students majoring in translation, was assigned to reading
for translation, while the second group of ten M.A. or doctoral English majors was assigned to reading for paraphrasing, and the third group of 13 M.A. or doctoral psychology majors was responsible for reading for comprehension. Though all the groups didn’t really do anything other than reading, the researchers believed that by simply informing the participants of the purpose for reading, reading time would be affected. The results showed that the reading purpose did exert some influence on the reading time, which was the longest for reading for translation, followed by reading for comprehension and for paraphrasing, respectively. In general, translators did read differently to some extent and there was a wide within-group variability, but this kind of reading still “has much in common with other kinds of reading, especially with that of paraphrasers, where language conversion is required by the tasks” (Shreve,
Schäffner, Danks & Griffin, 1993, p. 35). According to the authors, though it could be said that translators read more thoroughly and deliberately to some extent, the reading strategy still resembled a more general reading for comprehension in much part.
On the other hand, two experiments in Macizo and Bajo’s (2004) study showed contradictory findings. In each experiment, eight professional translators who did not participate in the other experiment were recruited to either read to comprehend or read to translate 96 sentences. Generally, the reading time of reading for translation was significantly longer than that of reading for repetition, indicating some other
processes going on at the same time while one was “reading” the sentences (see also Macizo & Bajo, 2006; ambiguity and cognate facilitation evidently affected reading for translation, but not reading for repetition).
Göpferich, Jakobsen, and Mees (2008) sided with this purpose-driven view of reading behavior as well. Six professional practitioners and six translation students participated in the research, and four types of tasks were used: reading for
comprehension; reading in preparation for translating; reading while speaking a translation (sight translation); and reading while typing a written translation (Göpferich et al., 2008, p. 106). While the difference between the mean fixation duration of different tasks was only close to significance, we still see an obvious numerical gap between any two modes. Meanwhile, the number of fixations was considerably and reliably different between all four tasks. The findings are a further testimony to the fact that various purposes for reading lead to distinct behavior.
With a similar goal in mind, Shreve, Lacruz and Angelone (2010) used two Spanish texts for participants to perform sight translation. Eye movement information was recorded with an eye tracker for comparison with the data of a bilingual reading task. In general, there were more and longer fixations during sight translation than bilingual reading. On top of that, regressions were significantly more, and larger proportion of fixations was accounted for by regressions in sight translation. Taking the above results into account, reading for comprehension does seem to differ from reading for sight translation.
Yet, Shreve et al. (2010) warned that the results have to be interpreted with caution, since the baseline study (the bilingual reading task) was silent reading. As Levy-Schoen (1981) has pointed out that reading aloud is generally a more effortful activity than silent reading and causes longer eye fixation durations, some of the
significant difference between sight translation and bilingual reading might emerge as a function of reading out loud the sight-translated text, rather than of the demand imposed by the component of reformulation.
The above findings, though somewhat divergent, on reading patterns in different tasks open a window into the cognitive world of sight translation. Studying the behavior of reading in this mode of interpreting is a direct, scientific method towards understanding whether the characteristics of the mode alter the processing mechanism used in average daily reading.
2.2.4 A perspective provided by reading research: Eye-movement indices