Eye Tracking Study of Reading and Sight Translation

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a pilot eye tracking study involving reading and sight translation. Seventeen participants with one year of sight translation training were asked to read and sight translate two texts from B language (English) into A language (Russian). The texts included such independent variables as abbreviations, position titles, references to historic and cultural events and phenomena as well as direct speech, epithets, metaphors. The dependent variables included measures assumed to indicate cognitive load of lexical units, such as fixation count and saccade count. The application of the eye tracking method to the research of the translation process may be helpful in understanding the difficulties of sight translation as a particular form of transposing the message from one language into another and help to make appropriate pedagogical conclusions.