訓練與經驗對英譯中視譯認知歷程影響之研究：眼動與產出之整合分析

全文

(1)Doctoral Dissertation Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation National Taiwan Normal University. An Integrated Eye-tracking Study into the Cognitive Process of English-Chinese Sight Translation: Impacts of Training and Experience. Advisors Dr. Chen, Tze-Wei Dr. Tsai, Jie-Li By Ho, Chen-En (Ted) March 2017.

(2) 17. 18. 18 reading ahead. first pass second pass. global data local reading indices. reading span. principal branching direction units. hesitation pause juncture pause. i.

(3) ii.

(4) Abstract Sight translation has long been regarded as nothing more than a pedagogical tool. However, the role of sight translation has become more important in practice, and even necessary for certain fields such as community interpreting. What’s more, with a growing number of studies proving this task to be no easier than other modes of interpreting, we are now granted an opportunity to further develop the discipline of interpreting studies by looking into the cognitive process of sight translation, which can be directly observed with an eye tracker. This study analyzed data of 17 experienced interpreters, 18 interpreting students, and 18 untrained bilinguals, hoping to 1) find out if reading purpose affects reading behavior in different ways, 2) understand the impacts of training and experience, and 3) look more closely at the behavior of reading ahead and pausing during sight translation. The results showed that, different reading purposes did change reading behavior, but there were still similarities between tasks. Reading for comprehension was similar to reading for sight translation in the first pass of reading, while the two started to diverge in the second pass. On the other hand, reading aloud, a task requiring more efforts in the first pass, began to resemble silent reading more than sight translation in the second pass. Generally speaking, the cognitive load imposed on silent reading was similar to (and a little less than) reading aloud, and sight translation was significantly more strenuous. Turning to the impacts of training and experience, it was found that the quality of sight translation was the highest for experts, followed by trainees and then untrained bilinguals. Global data showed less total time and fewer fixations for trained participants than bilinguals. Nevertheless, word counts, mean fixation duration in all local reading indices, and even reading span failed to show any difference. As it turned out, the difference lay in how each group proceeded with the task. Trained participants started sight-translating the text shortly after each trial began, with few fixations of reading ahead, when bilinguals mostly read through the text first, leaving a rather long silence at the outset. In addition, participants with training had significantly fewer fixations before uttering each Chinese character. Experts were extreme in that they rarely got bogged down, even when encountering contrastive linguistic structures. Trainees also manifested a similar tendency, though not as adept at the reformulation skills as experts. Bilinguals, on the opposite, showed much more iii.

(5) fixations and longer pauses from time to time. Overall, observable pauses were fewer for those with training, and average verbal gaps were shorter as well, leading to higher fluency and a quicker pace. While the impacts of training were obviously on quality and speed, experience seemed to mainly affect accuracy and the behavior of reading ahead and pausing once sight translation began. Experts, with ample experience, had a non-significant gap between the percentage of hesitation pause and that of juncture pause, whereas the other two groups had significantly more hesitation pauses. Notwithstanding, all groups tended to fixate on principal branching direction (PBD) units at least 50% of the time during pauses. Finally, trained participants (i.e., both experts and interpreting students) did not show any difference between the time spent on processing PBD and non-PBD units in all three tasks. On the other hand, untrained bilinguals already inclined to spend significantly longer time on PBD units during silent reading in a relatively later stage of first-pass processing and for meaning integration in non-first-pass reading. When performing sight translation, the results during silent reading were replicated; what was more, total viewing time on PBD units was also significantly longer, indicating that processing PBD units were more effortful for untrained bilinguals. Keywords: Sight translation, eye movement, cognitive process, reading ahead, training and experience. iv.

(6) v.

(7) Table of Contents. Chapter 1! Introduction ................................................................................................ 1! Chapter 2! Literature Review....................................................................................... 9! 2.1!. Definition of sight translation .................................................................... 9!. 2.2!. Reading .................................................................................................... 11!. 2.3!. Linguistic differences between Chinese and English .............................. 34!. 2.4!. Effort Models ........................................................................................... 41!. 2.5!. Sight translation and its uniqueness ......................................................... 44!. 2.6!. Traditional studies on sight translation: findings and limitations ............ 46!. 2.7!. Insights from cognitive psychology and interpreting studies .................. 53!. 2.8!. Chinese-English sight translation research .............................................. 69!. 2.9!. Summary .................................................................................................. 71!. Chapter 3! Research Method ..................................................................................... 80! 3.1!. Participants............................................................................................... 80!. 3.2!. Material .................................................................................................... 81!. 3.3!. Design ...................................................................................................... 84!. 3.4!. Procedure ................................................................................................. 86!. 3.5!. Apparatus ................................................................................................. 90!. 3.6!. Data analysis ............................................................................................ 90!. 3.7!. Research questions revisited .................................................................... 92!. Chapter 4! Results ...................................................................................................... 94! 4.1!. Background information of the participants ............................................ 94!. 4.2!. Global indices: Overall observation......................................................... 97!. 4.3!. Local reading indices: Micro analysis ................................................... 106!. 4.4!. Behavior during the process of sight translation.................................... 124!. 4.5!. Quality revisited: factors that had a say ................................................. 152. 4.6. Summary ................................................................................................157. Chapter 5! Discussion .............................................................................................. 159! 5.1!. Reading for comprehension vs. reading for sight translation: The impact of reading purposes ................................................................................ 160!. 5.2!. The influence of training on output and reading behavior ..................... 170! vi.

(8) 5.3!. The influence of experience on output and reading behavior ................ 176!. 5.4!. Intertwined relationships between indices and the skill of chunking, and even reading ahead… ............................................................................. 181!. 5.5!. The real deal during pauses.................................................................... 189!. Chapter 6! Conclusion ............................................................................................. 193! 6.1!. Reading purposes matter, training has immediate observable influence, but experience still has a role to play ..................................................... 193!. 6.2!. Implications for interpreter training ....................................................... 196!. 6.3!. Limitations and suggestions................................................................... 198!. References ................................................................................................................ 200! Appendix I: Experiment materials (with reading difficulty rating sheet) .................. 219! Appendix II: Experiment instruction ......................................................................... 222! Appendix III: Participant consent form ..................................................................... 225! Appendix IV: Background questionnaire .................................................................. 226 Appendix V: Paired samples test tables for within-group comparisons ....................240. vii.

(9) List of Tables Table 1 Studies addressing questions relevant to this study.................................... 74! Table 2 Features of texts for formal trials ............................................................... 83! Table 3 Sequence of texts and corresponding tasks (identical for three groups) .... 85! Table 4 Trial-based total number of fixations across groups in three tasks ............ 98! Table 5 Trial-based total time across groups in three tasks (unit: second) ........... 100! Table 6 Total verbal output of three groups (word count) .................................... 104! Table 7 Sight translation performance rating (overall quality: on a 1-5 scale) ..... 105! Table 8 First fixation duration across groups in three tasks (unit: millisecond) ... 107! Table 9 Gaze duration across groups in three tasks (unit: millisecond) ................ 110! Table 10 Go-past time across groups in three tasks (unit: millisecond)................ 113! Table 11 Rereading time across groups in three tasks (unit: millisecond) ............ 116! Table 12 Total viewing time across groups in three tasks (unit: millisecond) ...... 120! Table 13 How many fixations each group had before sight translation began ..... 124! Table 14 Silent period before first utterance (unit: second) .................................. 126! Table 15 Average number of fixations before each non-first utterance ................ 128! Table 16 The percentage of pauses among all verbal gaps sensed by the audience across groups ........................................................................................... 131! Table 17 Average length and the distribution of pauses across groups (unit: second) .......................................................................................................... 132! Table 18 Number of fixations during each pause across groups ........................... 132! Table 19 Average number and distribution of fixations during each pause across groups: Group-based raw data without calculating the mean for each participant ................................................................................................. 134! Table 20 Average length of verbal gap: How long each group of participants waited until saying the next character out loud (unit: millisecond) ........ 135! Table 21 Rereading counts across groups in three tasks ....................................... 136! Table 22 The percentage of hesitation pause vs. juncture pause among all the pauses made by participants across groups when performing sight translation ............................................................................................... 140!. viii.

(10) Table 23 The percentage of fixations on PBD units of all fixations in pauses (percentage in hesitation pauses and juncture pauses also tabulated individually) ............................................................................................ 143! Table 24 Mean fixation duration on non-PBD and PBD units in silent reading across groups (unit: millisecond)............................................................. 148! Table 25 Mean fixation duration on non-PBD and PBD units in reading aloud across groups (unit: millisecond)............................................................. 149! Table 26 Mean fixation duration on non-PBD and PBD units in sight translation across groups (unit: millisecond)............................................................. 151! Table 27 Factors that have a significant effect on overall quality ......................... 154! Table 28 Factors that have a significant effect on accuracy .................................. 155! Table 29 Factors that have a significant effect on fluency .................................... 156! Table 30 Between-condition comparisons across groups (reference table) .......... 160! Table 31 Between-group comparisons across tasks (reference table) ................... 171! Table 32 Sight translation indices and reading behavior across groups (reference table) ........................................................................................................ 174! Table 33 Features related to pauses (reference table: 21 participants) .................. 190!. ix.

(11) List of Figures Figure 1!The distribution of how many fixations each group had before sight translation began ...................................................................................... 125! Figure 2 The distribution of how many seconds each group waited before sight translation began ...................................................................................... 127! Figure 3 The distribution of how many fixations each group relied upon to keep oral rendition going after sight translation began .................................... 129! Figure 4 First-pass reading indices across conditions for all groups..................... 161! Figure 5 GPT across conditions for all groups ...................................................... 165! Figure 6 Non-first-pass indices across conditions for all groups .......................... 166! Figure 7 How many fixations experienced interpreters had in each verbal gap: Example of an expert on one trial............................................................ 183! Figure 8 How many fixations interpreting students had in each verbal gap: Example of a trainee on one trial ............................................................. 185! Figure 9 How many fixations untrained bilinguals had in each verbal gap: Example of an average bilingual on one trial ......................................................... 186!. x.

(12) Chapter 1. Introduction. Interpreting has been a common practice that began long ago, but it had seldom come to researchers’ attention until 20th century. As the needs for international conferences or multilingual meetings among heads of nations or foreign affairs representatives rise, or due to the necessity for international tribunals to be held (specifically, the Nuremberg Trial as an example), interpreters per se and interpreting as a professional activity have become subjects of scientific investigation (Pöchhacker, 2015). It is also because of the skyrocketing needs of interpreters, training programs abound accordingly. Though the notion of professionalization started to gain ground some time ago, and interpreting did attract some scholarly interest in other disciplines, this mode of communication was mostly a subtopic that was within the research scope solely of professional practitioners and a small fraction of academics in the world (Pöchhacker, 2004). The early 1990s is a historic turning point. The field of interpreting has since successfully established itself as an independent discipline, and much more connections with other academic disciplines have been bridged. The realm of interpreting research regarding topics, scopes, and methodology has also since diversified, taking this field of study to an international level (Pöchhacker, 2004). As a result, conferences on interpreting research, postgraduate-level theses, and journal papers multiplied due to wide recognition from the general public and academia (Gile, 2001). It was also at this time that more doctorate programs came on board to instill new momentum into interpreting research (Moser-Mercer & Setton, 2000). 1.

(13) In the beginning stage of academization, studies on conference interpreting was the mainstream, due to the “halos” bestowed onto interpreters that showed up on the stage or at the venues of high-end conferences or meetings. Interest was directed towards how one could adequately recall messages conveyed by speakers or perform such work as listening and speaking at the same time, and, of course, how one can be trained to become a professional practitioner. For example, Shlesinger (2000; cited from Mizuno, 2005) examined the working memory (WM) model proposed by Baddeley (1992) and found that concurrent activities of listening and speaking does exert a high cognitive load and is detrimental to interpreters’ retention of information in the working memory. Gile (1997) explicated the cognitive mechanisms of simultaneous interpreting, consecutive interpreting, and sight translation, and also how limited cognitive resources may affect one’s performance. Studies at that time were mainly curious about the skill per se. Later on, because of large-scale immigration and the rising needs for sign language communication, community interpreting became a prevalent activity; issues that would typically concern community interpreters were increasingly added to the list of research topics in researchers’ mind, including settings and context, the role and identity of the interpreter, the power relations among interlocutors, or ethics and skillsets required in each unique context, to name just a few. In addition, due to the fact that qualified professional interpreters with suitable language combinations are not always readily available when one is needed in the legal, medical or social service context, some issues regarding expertise or the use of “natural” interpreters have 2.

(14) especially piqued the interest of scholars (Pöchhacker, 2008, 2015). The trend of a “social turn” in research topics is further corroborated by Liu (2011) with an examination of papers published in Interpreting between 2004 and 2009 (see also Pöchhacker, 2008). Almost a century after the beginning of interpreting studies, the broadening of the research repertoire is clearly a fact: from the skills and strategies, theories of interpreting, training of interpreters, and performance to work environment, communicative settings, roles and ethics, work-related technology, and the whole industry, including client relationships and professionalization (see also Ho, 2013; Liao, 2007). However, sight translation has rarely showed up as a topic of interest. Part of the result may come from the popular belief that this skill, as a hybrid of translation and interpreting, has less practical utility in the daily tasks of a conference interpreter, for whom consecutive and simultaneous interpreting take up almost the entire scope of work. Even if there are written materials prepared for participants’ reference, the interpreter can always let go of the document at hand and focus solely on the main medium of message transmission: voice of the speaker. Considering that sight translation can be used to help students develop the skill of parsing or chunking, which may help ease the heavy cognitive burden of stacking up too much information before reformulation in simultaneous interpreting, many interpreter trainers tend to use sight translation as a pedagogical tool in class at best (Agrifoglio, 2004; Viaggio, 1995; Weber, 1990).. 3.

(15) Nonetheless, in the world of community interpreting, sight translation is a task quite regularly performed. All too often, documents including briefs, affidavits, statements, or exhibits are presented in court without interpreters given copies of the documents in advance. In this setting, where average citizens’ basic human rights are at stake, a competent sight translation skill is a prerequisite for all content to be translated into another language faithfully without any addition, deduction, or manipulation (Sampaio, 2007); National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators and even International Organization for Standardization have both officially recognized sight translation as a necessary skill for court interpreters (Erickson, Bonet, Festinger, Framer, & Macfarlane, 2006; ISO 13611:2014). The same emphasis on the importance of sight translation is also shared by institutions working on medical interpreting, such as National Council on Interpreting in Health Care (2009) and International Medical Interpreters Association (2009). Interestingly, even conference interpreting scholars have started to recognize an ever-bigger role played by sight translation skills. For example, Weber (1990) pointed out that sight translation could be used as a tool to prepare oneself for an incoming conference by actually speaking out loud technical terms, lingo, or specific ways of expression preferred by professionals in a certain field to build muscle memory. In addition, sight translation also has its place in consecutive and simultaneous interpreting, for one may at times run into the need to render a manuscript or PowerPoint slides prepared by the speaker. Some scholars eyeing the translation industry also observe that sight translation, coupled with speech recognition or audio 4.

(16) recording software, may be a new method to boost translators’ productivity and efficiency so that they can meet diverse requirements coming from clients while maintaining acceptable quality (see Biela-Woùoñciej, 2007; Dragsted & Hansen, 2009; and Dragsted, Mees & Hansen, 2011). With all its significance in the daily practice of interpreters or even translators, sight translation has every reason to be more than a pedagogical tool and deserves further exploration. Previous studies on sight translation tried to understand the nature of this mode of interpreting and proved that this skill is just as unique and difficult as simultaneous and consecutive interpreting. Some focused on the cognitive load in the process, while some others paid attention to error types that are prevalent in each interpreting mode. Still others contemplated on how interpreters can smoothly sight-translate a text as if they were simply reading a text out loud in another language. The findings were fruitful, but some flaws in the methodology were quite common in these studies, including a rather small pool of participants and unclear standards for grouping, a fixed sequence for tasks and stimuli, a lack of control over the materials that led to practice effects and incomparable results, and also inferences that could not be backed by the empirical evidence at hand. It is also a pity that most papers were product-based analyses, which gave us the end results but could not help us unveil the mysterious cognitive process of sight translation. Viezzi (1989) proved that content retention rate was lower in sight translation than in simultaneous interpreting, especially when the syntactic structures were widely diverse between the languages required by the task. Her (1997) and 5.

(17) Chang (2008) repeatedly found syntactic structures to hamper interpreters’ smooth rendition. Agrifoglio (2004) and Chiang, Kuo and Chen (2009) each observed a high percentage of expression errors and inadequate pauses in the output of sight translation. Through output analysis, we have seen firsthand the difficulties of sight translation, which are no less challenging than consecutive or simultaneous interpreting. However, what factors impact sight translation production? What leads to the faltering or stammering rendition, at which point, and how? How exactly is sight translation done? These questions can only be solved when the above findings are coupled with a look in the process, that is, how information is received, deciphered, reformulated, and produced. To disclose the cognitive process of sight translation, an examination of reading has to be included, since it is the only channel through which we gather information. Forerunners in the field of cognitive psychology have elucidated that reading itself is a complex mechanism which involves phonological and morphological decoding, meaning extraction, and even constant mapping of meaning on the word level to that which is conveyed through syntactic structures to help the reader get the full picture. In bilingual reading, factors such as the readers’ linguistic competences in each language, the language environment, or even the knowledge and features of the second set of language systems further play a role and lead to facilitative or inhibitory effects on information retrieval. Specifically, syntactic differences in two languages have clear impacts on not just bilingual reading (Fernández, 2002; Frenck-Mestre, 2002), but also sight translation (Chang, 2008; Her, 1997; Viezzi, 1989), a mode of 6.

(18) interpreting that requires the interpreter to activate both language systems but at the same time suppress structural disparities so as to ensure correct comprehension in one language and natural production in another in rapid succession. Hence, distinctive syntactic structures serve as an important reason for the present study’s examination of English-Chinese sight translation. We have already learned much about reading from the field of cognitive psychology and have also uncovered some interesting truths about interpreting. Yet, these two worlds seem to flourish in parallel without much connection. Sight translation is the skill that links reading and interpreting. Hence, a closer look at how reading is utilized during a mode of interpreting is a contribution of this study. To give a general picture of how sight translation is conducted and what really happens in the process, and to answer a few questions frequently asked by trainers and scholars, this study aimed to outline the cognitive process by tracking how interpreters read the texts to be translated via an eye tracker. Although four M.A. theses in Taiwan, including Huang (2011), Chen (2013), Su (2013), and Hsieh (2014), have already offered some valuable observation, all of their topics were confined to Chinese-to-English sight translation. This dissertation intended to complement previous findings with an opposite direction, which has never been investigated whatsoever, to lay the foundation for a deeper understanding of sight translation. With features of the reading process as the backbone of this study, supplemented with quality assessment, we set out to tackle three main issues that frequented topics of papers in relevant fields, including the influence of reading purpose, training, and 7.

(19) interpreting experience. We first tried to identify whether reading purposes would affect reading behavior. Then, we looked into how training would further influence reading behavior during sight translation and its output. Lastly, we saw how interpreting experience would make interpreters adjust the way they read and sight translate texts and what impacts experience would have on the oral rendition.. 8.

(20) Chapter 2. Literature Review. This chapter was divided into a few sections. The first section defined what sight translation is and what cognitive process or skills are involved when performing this mode of interpreting. It goes without saying that an introduction of reading as a complex activity is necessary, as is bilingual reading. The characteristics of bilingual reading are closely relevant to this study because all interpreters (and sight-translators) are users of at least two languages. The last part of this section entailed why eye tracking would be the best fit for this study and also the eye-movement indices frequently used, and some brief explanation of the importance of those indices and their role in revealing the cognitive process of reading and sight translation. In addition, general linguistic structures of Chinese and English were compared and contrasted. Next, we discussed findings and limitations of “traditional” research on sight translation, and also some other more non-traditional studies on the same topic. The section that followed would address recent eye tracking studies on Chinese-English sight translation. Lastly, the discussion turned to what remains to be done if we wish to more understand sight translation as a sophisticated activity and the grounds for this current dissertation. 2.1 Definition of sight translation Sight translation, by definition, is a special type of simultaneous interpreting in which written texts are rendered orally (Pöchhacker, 2004). In light of this fact, some 9.

(21) also refer to sight translation as a “hybrid” form of interpreting and translation, since it resembles the former in its way of conveying messages and the latter in that the reception of incoming content is through reading (Chen, 2015). Even until today, sight translation has received relatively little attention precisely because of its hybrid feature. Translators enjoy unlimited time to ponder over the linguistic differences between their working languages and the final product, theoretically, so that they don’t see the need to apply sight translation to their task at hand. This is even truer for interpreters, whose work always consists of interpreting messages of speakers, not writers. At the end, sight translation is treated at best as pedagogical tools in the classroom (Weber, 1990). Trainees learn sight translation skills to chunk messages into smaller units so that they don’t get bogged down by a huge amount of incoming information during simultaneous interpreting when language structures are distinct in their working language pair. Some trainers also ask students to apply this kind of skill just to explore possibilities for dealing with sentences with an intricate structure. However, in addition to the utility aspect we mentioned in the first chapter, sight translation itself is also intriguing from a cognitive perspective. Two different channels are invoked to complete the task of sight translation, including one’s reading ability to properly receive messages and speaking ability to reproduce content in another language. We can reasonably expect that reading as a sophisticated activity and cross-language differences that are more prominent in writing will have their impacts on the successfulness of a sight-translator’s rendition. 10.

(22) 2.2 Reading 2.2.1. Reading in general Reading is an inevitable part in sight translation, as it’s the only source of input.. This task involves the procedure of extracting information from written words and constructing a mental representation of the whole text or comprehending the meaning conveyed. Within this process that is cumbersome in nature but rather quick in relation to time, a few fundamental subtasks have to be completed before we can determine whether the reading task is done successfully. First of all, word identification is a core element and a prerequisite of reading that we encounter early on. Information is purely embedded in written symbols, and therefore orthographic decoding is the first and foremost step (de Groot, 2013), among which letter recognition plays the central role. Individual features such as horizontal or oblique lines are preserved in readers’ mental storage, and the number of matching features decides whether a certain letter will be activated or not (Rayner, Pollatsek, Ashby, & Clifton Jr., 2012). Under this efficient framework, our brain can save a huge amount of cognitive resources and quickly identify letters to trigger meaning access in later stages (for further discussion, see Grainger, Rey, & Dufau, 2008). After letters and letter strings are activated or “fired”, the information goes one step further to activate phonological and even semantic information. The information passes through two routes for meaning extraction. One is through the. 11.

(23) Grapheme-to-Phoneme route, in which phonological coding is first activated and then the semantic information is retrieved, while the other is through the lexical route, in which orthographic information directly leads to semantic meaning. The latter is especially needed for words with irregular pronunciation (Coltheart, 2000; and see Jobard, Crivello, & Tzourio-Mazoyer, 2003 for relevant information). Researchers in reading found that these two routes are probably not contradictory, but rather co-existent, and they compete as morphological information is fed to both routes and whichever processes faster wins the “meaning retrieval game”. Phonological information is important for word identification and even for comprehension during reading (Frost, 1998). Inner speech can be a persuasive support for this point of view. It’s been found in many electromyogram (EMG) studies (the tool which measures the electrical activity of muscles) that less-skilled readers tend to rely on subvocalization more than skilled readers do, and the phenomenon of subvocalization becomes more prevalent as text difficulty increases. In addition, comprehension suffers when difficult texts are encountered and subvocalization eliminated (Rayner et al., 2012). The phenomenon of inner speech does seem to make some sense, since children start learning a language through speaking and listening, while reading comes later as a relatively unnatural activity. In order to facilitate learning how to read, children are inclined to resort to sounding out words (Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetksy, & Seidenberg, 2001, 2002). Aside from this fact, phonological information is preserved. 12.

(24) better in short-term memory (Rayner et al., 2012), which is absolutely needed for information processing and meaning integration. Generally, as the activation of lexical representation passes a certain “threshold”, a word is recognized, and the meaning and syntactic properties become available for further processing (de Groot, 2013). However, the intended meaning of a word does not naturally “emerge” every time. For words with multiple meanings, a selection mechanism has to be in place to ascertain the suitable meaning that is plausible and consistent with the whole context or the previously constructed scenario. Rayner, Cook, Juhasz, and Frazier (2006) clearly demonstrated through fixation durations the effect of meaning selection and the cognitive effort induced. In their experiment, a word in each sentence was selected as the ambiguous stimulus. In one condition, the dominant meaning of the ambiguous word would be suitable for interpreting the sentence; in the other, the subordinate meaning would be a better fit. In addition, sentences were classified into two categories: one with a modifier to prime the meaning, and one without. The researchers found that when there was a modifier that prompted the subordinate meaning, fixation time became longer than in the neutral context and in conditions that went with the dominant meaning. Interestingly, the ambiguous word with the dominant meaning was fixated longer when not preceded by a dominant-meaning prompting modifier. The above findings suggest that a context, even just one modifier preceding the target, can affect the meaning retrieval process, not to mention the influence of the global context, which. 13.

(25) clearly sways the amount of time spent on resolving meaning issues (see Duffy, Morris, & Rayner, 1988; Kambe, Rayner, & Duffy, 2001). In Rayner, Warren, Juhasz, and Liversedge’s (2004) experiment, sentences that were 1) normal, 2) possible but somewhat implausible, and 3) anomalous were employed to examine their effects on eye movements. The results showed that, starting from gaze duration, eye movement indices were obviously affected in the anomalous condition, meaning the comprehension process was seriously disrupted, while in the implausible condition, go-past time was the earliest index to “take a hit” but did not reach statistical significance. In Rayner et al.’s (2004) experiment, the syntactic structure was fixed, confining the possible thematic roles or features of the ensuing constituent, therefore limiting the discussion to plausibility of the matching between the verb and the noun that followed. In addition to semantic information, syntactic properties also impact the comprehension process in their own way. Frazier and Rayner (1982) successfully proved the influence of syntactic parsing. In their experiment, two sentences as stated below were shown to participants: The girl knew the answer by heart. (Direct object) The girl knew the answer was wrong. (Sentence complement) Participants were found to have more difficulty reading the second sentence. Eye fixations were longer, and the number of regressions increased, suggesting that readers originally adopted a certain way of assigning roles to each constituent, which. 14.

(26) was suitable for the first sentence, but not for the other. When they found the grammatical structure of the following part did not correspond to their assumption, they had to reanalyze the sentence. Garden-path sentences are another kind of stimulus most favored by reading scholars. McDonald and Carpenter (1981) successfully drew out the influence of idiom interpretation on participants’ comprehension. In their experiment, sight translators in the study returned to former regions (in the form of regressions) when encountering disambiguating information that exhibited inconsistency with their earlier interpretation of the idiom further down the sentences. Though this experiment is more related to semantic processing, when combined as a whole with aforementioned studies, it shows that sentence processing is incremental in its nature (see Frazier & Rayner, 1982; Rayner et al., 2006). 2.2.2. Bilingual reading The task of reading and comprehension starts from word identification to. semantic selection and integration, syntactic processing, and finally to continuous mapping of current information to the mental representation and incessant verification of the consistency across perceived messages. Many factors have a role to play on the path towards comprehension in the process, including orthographic, phonological, and morphological information, semantic richness, frequency, familiarity, plausibility, syntactic properties, and even context. The same holds true for bilingual reading.. 15.

(27) Complex as reading already is, we can fairly claim that bilingual reading is even more complicated because two language systems may be activated at the same time, though there is only monolingual input. This non-selective view of language activation has already been proven by numerous studies. For example, Dutch-English bilinguals were invited to participate in the experiments of Dijkstra, van Jaarsveld, and ten Brinke’s (1998). For the English lexical decision task, Dutch-English cognates, homographs, and control words that do not share such similarities were used as stimuli. Participants reacted to cognates significantly faster than to control words. In the meantime, homographs did not bring this kind of processing benefits. This points to the facilitative effect of knowledge in a language while encountering stimuli in another language. Dijkstra, Grainger and van Heuven (1999) conducted similar experiments to further identify how cognates, homographs, and homophones influence reading behavior. Dutch-English bilinguals were recruited, and this time the authors successfully found the impacts of each element, that is, the effects of overlap in meaning, orthography, and phonology between two languages. Significant facilitation in response time was observed for cognates and homographs, but the effects brought by homophones were the opposite, that is, participants spent significantly longer time identifying homophones than controls. According to the authors, the lack of homograph effects in Dijkstra et al.’s (1998) paper lies in the selection of stimuli. In other words, the positive homograph effects had been confounded by the inhibitory phonological influence. 16.

(28) In addition, Beauvillain and Grainger (1987) also found orthographical effects by using homographs in French and English. English-French bilinguals were shown a French prime word followed by an English target word (or non-word) and had to decide whether the target was a real word. The results show that non-target language seems to have been activated initially, independent of the language context. What’s more, the frequency of each word in either language was more capable of determining whether meanings would be activated or not than the language mode per se, lending more clear support for the non-selective view of language activation. Duyck, van Assche, Drieghe, and Hartsuiker (2007) used both a lexical decision task and a sentence-reading task to verify the effects of cognates on reading. The Dutch-English bilinguals showed a facilitation bonus on trials with cognates, in comparison with control trials, and response was significantly faster. Furthermore, even during sentence reading, cognates (both identical and non-identical) still sped up processing, shortening the response time at a statistically significance level. Though the third experiment of theirs only successfully replicated facilitation effect for identical cognates, it still attests to the idea of cross-language activation. Also using sentence reading as the task is Schwartz and Kroll (2006). Spanish-English bilinguals with a high- and intermediate- L2 proficiency partook in their experiments to read L2 sentences. For the highly proficient L2 group, significant cognate facilitation was observed only in low-constraint sentences, meaning there were indeed cognate effects, but the context provided by the sentence was strong enough to suppress non-selective activation (as evidenced in high-constraint 17.

(29) sentences). The group with less L2 proficiency generally showed similar trends. However, one thing worthy of note is that homographs did negatively influence this second group’s performance. Homographs are identical in form but different in meaning between two languages, so this group of participants experienced competition between meanings during the experiment, leading to higher error rates of judgment even for highly contextual sentences. Van Hell and de Groot (2008) looked into the influence of contextual constraint of a sentence on reading as well. Cognate and concreteness effects were examined with high-constraint and low-constraint sentences. The authors invited Dutch-English bilinguals as subjects, and they were to engage in a lexical decision task or a translation task. Participants had to first read a sentence attentively (serving as the context), and then to 1) decide whether the target word that replaced the context was a real English word or 2) translate the target word as soon as the word appeared. On the whole, cognate effects were vibrant during low-constraint sentences and largely reduced for highly contextual ones for both lexical decision and translation tasks. Following the same line of research, Libben and Titone (2009) asked French-English bilinguals to read English sentences embedded with inter-lingual homographs and cognates in either a high- or low-semantic-constraint context. Results again mirrored previous studies. Homographs were read significantly slower than control words under both low and high sentential constraints. Cognates, on the contrary, exhibited facilitative effects, largely shortening the reading time in both types of sentences. Specifically, this study found that non-selective access of 18.

(30) languages is sustained, even during early stages of reading for high-constraint sentences: The effects disappeared only in late-stage measures (i.e. 350-600 ms), while in the low-constraint context the impacts remained effective. Another interesting finding is that cognate facilitation, by and large, decreased as L2 proficiency increased, which may provide a hint towards understanding the relationship between linguistic competence and cognitive mechanisms. In addition to orthography and meaning, phonological information in either language seems to be available for access (and even mandatory) during bilingual reading. Van Leerdam, Bosman, and de Groot (2009) asked Dutch-English bilinguals to read one English word and listen to a speech segment at a time and judge whether the two rhyme. Stimuli were all English words, with some having friendly neighbors (similar pronunciation) and enemies (different pronunciation) in English or in Dutch, some being distinct in its own way. The authors found that participants were often misled by enemy neighbors, and error rates for deciding whether the written stimulus rhymed with the speech segment rose significantly, supporting the view of cross-language phonological activation. This mechanism seems to transcend the boundary between different alphabets because the same phenomenon has been already documented in another study, this time regarding Hebrew-English and English-Hebrew bilinguals, by Gollan, Forster, and Frost (1997). Though asymmetric activation was observed during the experiments, the results still showed that phonology played a part in assisting participants in reading. When reading an L2 word with an L1 prime, access to cognates (words overlapping in meaning and 19.

(31) phonology) was facilitated more than to non-cognates (words only overlapping in meaning), and the difference reached significance. On the other hand, the priming effects were not found with L2 primes. Interpretation and implications of this study should be treated with caution because it used loan words (cognates that are actually borrowed from English). According to the authors, this is inevitable because Hebrew was revived as a spoken language early in the 20th century after having been used solely for religious purposes for hundreds of years. For this reason, the language lacked many lexical items for modern terminology. Although some modern words were created by adapting a Hebrew root morphologically, many modern words were simply borrowed from English (Gollan et al., 1997, p. 1123) While loan words in Hebrew are morphologically changed, the similarity between a loan word and an English foreign word is so overwhelming that, for many people, the two words are actually identical, leading to a possible L2-L2 combination in this priming task. Luckily, a similar trend in English-Hebrew bilinguals may serve to clear this doubt. We have seen plenty of evidence that supports the non-selective view of language access for bilinguals. However, the aforementioned findings are confined to word-level phenomena. Does non-selectivity still hold when it comes to sentence reading and comprehension? This question is important and sound, since the topic of this current dissertation deals with sigh translation, in which sentence-level processing is as important as word recognition, if not more crucial.. 20.

(32) Indeed, studies on bilingual sentence reading have reported findings in support of non-selectivity. What’s more, language proficiency, age of acquisition and language exposure (environment) may all have a part to play when it comes to bilingual reading (for more detail, including findings on semantic and syntactic processing in bilingual reading, see Fernández, 2002; Frenck-Mestre, 2005; Hernández, Fernández, & Aznar-Besé, 2009). Frenck-Mestre (1997) reported findings of several experiments, among which one instructed highly proficient French-English bilinguals to read syntactically ambiguous English sentences. The reading pattern for skilled non-native readers resembled that of native English readers. Nonetheless, the author still observed some L1 influence during the process. That is, participants hesitated when they looked at the subordinate verb in the sentences that violated lexical constraints in their native language. In another experiment, a group of beginning English-French bilinguals and a group of French native speakers both read French sentences, each with a relative clause. While the French native speakers showed preference for N1 attachment, linking the first noun phrase appearing in the sentence with the relative clause, English-French bilinguals did not have any reliable preference but a slight tendency towards N2 (the second noun phrase in the experimental sentences) attachment, which is typical in English. Though it might be possible that people tend to attach new information to the most recently processed element when faced with a not-so-familiar language, with another experiment reported in the same paper, the author was able to ascertain that the aforementioned phenomenon indeed came from L1 influence. In this 21.

(33) last experiment, beginning Spanish-French bilinguals were recruited to read French sentences with a relative clause. Since the Spanish participants were less skilled in French, a logical consequence following the recency attachment strategy would be that the relative clause was linked to N2 consistently. Yet, both Spanish-French bilinguals and native French participants manifested an identical inclination, which is natural in both the Spanish and French language — they all had reliable preference for N1 attachment. From Frenck-Mestre (1997), we can clearly see the impact of a bilingual’s mother tongue and how second language competence affects one’s reading pattern (see also Frenck-Mestre, 2005 for similar findings with ERPs). Frenck-Mestre (2002) also attested to the fact that proficient second-language readers exhibit highly resembling pattern of processing with that of native readers. According to the author, though total viewing time may be longer for L2 readers, proficient second-language readers demonstrate an immediate sensitivity to the same factors that influence native readers’ initial progression through the sentence. Both structural ambiguity and lexical constraints influence the first pass reading times of proficient non-native readers, just as they do those of native readers (Frenck-Mestre, 2002, p. 219). A somewhat different voice comes from Dussias (2003). Dussias invited proficient English-Spanish and Spanish-English bilinguals to fill out a questionnaire regarding choices when reading temporarily ambiguous sentences with a complex noun phrase followed by a relative clause, and to also perform a reading task to gather. 22.

(34) real-time data. As a result, both groups preferred low attachment, similar to English monolinguals but not native Spanish speakers. The results partly contradict the notion of L1 influence. One explanation provided by the author was that the cognitive demands exerted by the stimuli might have induced the minimal effort strategies (recency attachment effect). However, an alternative and likely explanation is that language exposure plays a role, since both groups of participants live in an English environment. The role of language exposure in reading has been further substantiated by Dussias and Sagarra (2007). Two groups of skilled Spanish-English bilinguals, living in the Spanish and the English environment respectively, and an additional group of Spanish monolinguals all read structurally ambiguous sentences as those in Dussias’s (2003) study. The results showed that monolinguals and bilinguals living in the L1 environment exhibited L1 processing preference for relative clauses; on the other hand, the group of people living in the L2 environment clearly showed L2 processing preference. In addition to language ability and exposure, how age of acquisition affects language processing can be observed in Izura and Ellis’s (2004) translation judgment task, in trials of which participants had to decide whether the meanings of a pair of words were identical or not. Spanish-English bilinguals participated in the experiments, and the authors found that, when translation was involved, early-acquired L2 words were processed faster than late-acquired L2 counterparts,. 23.

(35) while one’s native language also determined the relative speed of meaning extraction during translation. Up to this, point, we have seen the intricate dynamic between two languages in bilingual reading. On the word level, phonological (homophones), orthographical (homographs) information and a shared origin (cognates) may affect word identification in reading or even translation in their own way, positively or negatively. As for factors outside the boundary of words, contextual constraints, the reader’s first language, proficiency of each language, the time when the reader learn certain words, or even the environment (language exposure in daily life) may influence the efficiency of reading, all due to the non-selective feature of all the language subsystems in bilingual reading. 2.2.3. Reading in sight translation 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. 24.

(36) 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 25.

(37) 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). 26.

(38) 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 27.

(39) 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 To really understand what happens or what causes problems in the process in. order to get a better picture of sight translation, we need a tool with high temporal resolution to reflect on-line changes of cognitive operations and in the meantime allowing oral rendition during the experiment. Sight translation relies on reading to gain information, and therefore an eye tracker seems to be the best fit for the time being, since some other prominent research methods are not compatible with the requirements. For example, speaking can easily confound the data collected with ERPs, while PET is rather expensive and low in temporal resolution, though accurate in pinpointing locations (see Mitchell, 2004 for further detail). The advantages provided by an eye tracker are numerous. First of all, it directly monitors the eye. Based on Just and Carpenter’s (1980) immediacy assumption and eye-mind hypothesis, when the eye fixates on a word, processing automatically begins,. 28.

(40) and the aforementioned morphological, phonological, lexical information and even word meanings, grammatical features, contextual constraints will start to come into play until all processing required for comprehension is completed. In addition, the mind (attention) will direct the movement of the eye, and hence we can be quite assured that what the reader is reading is practically what he or she is (at least partly) dealing with. Although Inhoff and Radach (1998) warned the possibilities of pre-processing of the word ensuing the fixated target word, and Radach and Kennedy (2004) also illustrated the workings of the spillover effect (the cognitive burden of the previous region carried over to the current target word), we can still be confident that monitoring the time spent on the fixated area offers useful information about the cognitive workings of the brain. For one, it’s hard to imagine any reader would choose to fixate on certain places with deliberate intention to suppress all related processing. For another, even with the pre-processing and spillover effect, a large part of the time spent still reflects the processing of the current target, which stays in the foveal vision that fits best for information extraction (see also Rayner, 2009). With an eye tracker, we are able to document moment-to-moment changes of the eyes and see on-line variations of cognitive load/effort or processing strategies, and even identify difficulties with data about when and where eyes move. Where interpreters’ eyes are fixating, for how long, and how they move while producing output simultaneously are interesting enough, but equally fascinating is what they try to do when they are not speaking. With more detailed information on the whole process, we may be one big step closer to the nature of sight translation. 29.

(41) To understand reading, scholars in this field have designed different indices to map behaviors of the eye to different stages (first-pass vs. non-first-pass) and tried to decipher the meaning behind each phenomenon. Among all kinds of indices, duration-related indicators are of major concern, while others, such as direction of movements and word skipping, serve as supplementary information, providing a more complete picture when taken into consideration all together. Below we introduce the main indices used in reading and sight translation research. First-pass fixation measures mainly include first fixation duration and gaze duration. These are the fixations made after an eye first enters a specified region of interest and before leaving it, and, whether alone or aggregated together, are considered as relatively immediate/early indices of cognitive processing when larger chunks are used as the unit for analyses (see for example Hyönä, Lorch & Rinck, 2003). Put separately, first fixation duration indicates “the duration of the first fixation on a target word during first pass sentence reading, irrespective of whether the target word receives one or several fixations” (Inhoff & Radach, 1998). When there is only one first-pass fixation on a target word, first fixation duration equates to gaze duration. As the first contact with new information, first fixation duration represents adequately the pre-lexical or lexical processing of a certain word. Some scholars doubt if first fixation duration really reflects the sole influence of the currently fixated word. Their suspicion does have some merit, since we have seen empirical evidence for preview and spillover effects. Taking it into consideration, a word may possibly be 30.

(42) processed before even being fixated, and, moreover, we may see lagging effects from earlier text in disguise of first fixation duration of the current word (Rayner, Juhasz, & Pollatsek, 2005; Tsai, Yen, & Wang, 2005). Gaze duration is defined as “the sum of all fixations on the word prior to moving to another word” (Rayner & Liversedge, 2004). Similar to first fixation duration, gaze duration is sensitive to some pre-lexical, lexical, and post-lexical features of words and texts. Looking from a broader perspective, gaze duration still manifests relatively early stages of processing; but when taking words as AOIs, one may find some factors taking its toll on gaze duration but not on first fixation duration (“later” effects) and vice versa (“early” effects that appear immediately but do not last long). Gaze duration shows a linearity pattern of variation as a function of word length, since some re-fixations are required for longer words compared to short words. At this point, it’s worth mentioning one closely related index: re-fixation rate. Re-fixation rate means “the ratio of the frequency of multiple target fixations over the frequency of multiple and single target fixations during first pass reading” (Inhoff & Radach, 1998; see also Tsai et al., 2005). Re-fixation rate can easily manifest impacts of word frequency, word difficulty, word length, and initial landing location. In translation and interpreting studies, gaze duration may be a great index reflecting the efforts needed to process words (McDonald & Carpenter, 1981) or even to start reformulation (cf. Chen, 2013). However, the question is, the indicator alone cannot tell us what the interpreter is really doing. For example, in Chen’s (2013) experiments, early fixation time of experts was found to roughly equate to that of 31.

(43) novices, contrary to general assumption that experts process information faster. Nonetheless, the quality was found to significantly supersede that of novices as a group. Chen inferred that the experts might have performed a greater deal of work within similar amount of time. Mean fixation duration is probably one last important first-pass index. It is seen as the mean duration of all fixations that appear during first-pass reading. As informative as other figures, mean fixation duration is susceptible to distortion. For example, fixations on a more difficult word may be more than those on an easy word, but with shorter duration for each fixation. In this way, the mean of multiple fixations has a chance to be less than single fixation duration on an easy word. Early indices are affected by orthographic, phonological, morphological properties, word frequencies, personal familiarity, and even contextual constraints, to name just a few (further detail see Rayner, 2009; Rayner et al., 2005; Tsai, Lee, Tzeng, Hung, & Yen, 2004). It’s wide consensus that first-pass measures mostly reflect the cognitive engineering of word identification and lexical processing. All the measures that emerge after the eye first leaves a target region will be labeled as second-pass reading. A few fundamental indices used for later stages of processing include rereading time, go-past time, and total viewing time, plus an important and related probability index: regression rate. Rereading time, according to Hyönä et al. (2003), is computed by adding all the subsequent fixations other than first-pass reading on a target word, representing later-stage processing after the word is identified. 32.

(44) Go-past time (in some studies also named regression path duration) is defined as “the time from first entering a region until moving past that region forward in the text” (Rayner & Liversedge, 2004). Some scholars use this index to capture the effects of some phenomena which are generally not easy to be identified through standard measures, including syntactic ambiguity, inconsistency, or the amount of processing load accumulated from earlier to the current region (see also Vonk & Cozijn, 2003). Go-past time may be especially useful in studies of sight translation, since some structural disparity and the different habit of placing main or subordinate message in the front between two languages may force the interpreter to go back when s/he has to restructure the whole sentence or digest again the heavier-than-expected information that need to be knitted closely with the current content. Regression rate, which stands for the percentage of readers moving their eyes back to previous regions, is tightly bound with go-past time and conveys similar messages. An issue with go-past time is that readers don’t necessarily go back for clues to solve problems at hand. They sometimes go further down, trying to gather more information to see if they can construct a more coherent structure of the content (see also Rayner & Liversedge, 2011). Lastly, total viewing duration (or total viewing time) sums up “all fixations in a given region” (Rayner & Liversedge, 2004). Clearly as the name suggests, total viewing time represents the assumed total cognitive effort expended on a target word or region. In reading, larger amount of total viewing time either indicates more difficulty encountered or more important information embedded. Since sight 33.

(45) translation involves reading as a necessary part of the task, the same index has the same potential of identifying the culprit that prevents interpreters from completing their task with flying colors. Further, when combined with other indicators, we might even find whether interpreters and readers, with different goals in mind, mostly care about or are boggled down by similar constituents or not. In order to outline the cognitive efforts in different stages during sight translation, two first-pass indices (first fixation duration and gaze duration) and three non-first-pass indices (go-past time, rereading time, and total viewing time) were selected for this study. In this way, we may be able to see word retrieval in early stages, meaning integration and information searching (or problem solving) in later stages, and the total time spent on words that reflect efforts to achieve appropriate mental representation. 2.3 Linguistic differences between Chinese and English Chinese and English belong to two distinct language systems. To begin with, English is an inflectional language with words composed of individual letters and a space serves as the boundary between every two neighboring words, while Chinese is non-inflectional with each Chinese character constituting words of different length without a clear boundary in between (Frost, 2012; Huang, 2009). Since affixations indicating tense, active or passive status, and other functions are not available in Chinese, word order seems to be of critical importance for users of this language (Jiang, 2009). As is claimed by Huang (2009), “Chinese is characterized by. 34.

(46) non-inflection and must express various syntactic and semantic relations through the use of function words and functional manipulation of word order” (p. 3). In addition to this fundamental difference, whether modifiers should precede or follow the modified is considered comparatively free in English but strict in Chinese. Other issues regarding the two languages have also been frequently discussed by scholars in linguistics, including the subject- vs. topic-prominence or the sequence of thematic organization (for example, see Chu, 1998; Hoosain, 1991; Li & Thompson, 2009). In order to systematically reflect the similarities and differences between languages, scholars often resort to four major typologies, which are principal branching direction (PBD), head parameter, topic-prominence vs. subject-prominence, and morphological typology (Chen, 2006a). Among the aforementioned four parameters, principal branching direction is the focus of this study, since in sight translation the principal branching direction is the most obtrusive feature that jumps out at the reader quite often when one reads written text in a non-native and structurally distinctive language. The concept of principal branching direction refers to the linguistic structures (modifiers) that are unmarked for most native speakers, and the concept basically covers the relationship between the modifier and the modified (also called “head”), that is, the relative position of the two components in one or multiple clauses. Here the “structures” mentioned are for the most part adjectives and adverbs on the word and phrase level, and also relative clauses and adverbial subordinate clauses (see. 35.

(47) Chen, 2006a; Diessel, 2004). In terms of adverbial subordinate clauses, most common types include temporal, conditional, concessive, and causal clauses. This dissertation confines itself to the use of the “modifier” and the “modified” because there is another criterion for contrastive linguistic analysis (i.e. head parameter) that also uses the word “head” but focuses on the relative position of the head and the complement (Chen, 2011). There are two categories under the typology of principal branching direction: left-branching (the modifier preceding the modified) and right-branching (the modifier following the modified). While Chinese is mostly left-branching (Huang, 2009; Yang, Perfetti, & Liu, 2010), English is centered around the right-branching principle on the phrase and sentence level and is only left-branching on the word level (Chen, 2006a). Consider the following examples: 1. Sentence level: (1) He is the attorney {whom I met yesterday}. (Relative clause) <Modified> + <Modifier> {. }. <Modifier> + <Modified> (2) He went home early {because he was sick}. (Adverbial subordinate clause) <Main Clause> + <Subordinate Clause> {. }. <Subordinate Clause> + <Main Clause> 2. Phrase level: (1) The girl {across the street} is pretty. <Modified> + <Modifier> {. }. <Modifier> + <Modified> 36.

(48) (2) I like to study {in the library}. <Modified> + <Modifier> {. }. <Modifier> + <Modified> 3. Word level: (1) He is a {smart} kid. <Modifier> + <Modified> {. }. <Modifier> + <Modified> (2) {Stinky} tofu is my favorite. <Modifier> + <Modified> { } <Modifier> + <Modified> The examples in the previous page clearly show that Chinese and English are quite similar on the word level. However, these two languages start to differ as the modifier grows from a single word to a phrase or a clause, with Chinese becoming stricter when considering the relative position of the modifier (for relevant discussion, see O’Grady, 2011). As a matter of fact, the stringent left-branching feature of Chinese is closely related to its “topic-comment” structure (relevant discussion see Young, 1982; Kirkpatrick, 1993). As Kirkpatrick (1993) put it, Chinese speakers prefer to offer supporting material or background information (topic) before delivering their main points (comment). Empirical studies in Chinese have also corroborated the notion of Chinese as a left-branching language and the relationship between this notion and the topic-comment structure. Wang (2006) collected a large sum of spoken and written data in Chinese from naturally occurring conversations, broadcast interviews and. 37.