The impact of linguistic metaphor on translation unit in target text processing: An eye tracking and keylogging English-Chinese translation study

Abstract

This study attempts to explore the effect of linguistic metaphors on translation unit (TU) during target text (TT) processing in English to Chinese translation based on the concept and model of attention unit (AU) (Hvelplund, 2011). Four eye-key indicators are examined in this research for cognitive load measurement: Total Attentional Duration (TA duration), AU count, AU duration and pupil dilation. Twenty-four student translators were asked to translate texts containing literal expressions without metaphor, linguistic metaphors with fixed expressions in target language (TL) and linguistic metaphors without fixed expressions in target language (TL). The results of statistical analysis suggest that text type plays a certain role in cognitive resource allocation, although indicators of eye tracking and keylogging do not always point to a same direction. The research outcome, especially the findings on the relationship between the type of linguistic metaphor and cognitive effort, provide empirical support for Schaeffer et al. (2016)'s notion of interim representation in the production process of linguistic metaphor translation.

Keywords

• Metaphor translation
• Translation unit
• Cognitive translation studies