Resumen de Measuring the difficulty of text translation: The combination of text-focused and translator-oriented approaches
Yanmei Liu, Binghan Zheng, Hao Zhou
This paper explores the impact of text complexity on translators’ subjective perception of translation difficultyand on their cognitive load. Twenty-six MA translation students from a UK university were asked to translate three English textswith different complexity into Chinese. Their eye movements were recorded by an eye-tracker, and their cognitive load wasself-assessed with a Likert scale before translation and NASA-TLX scales after translation. The results show that: (i) theintrinsic complexity measured by readability, word frequency and non-literalness was in line with the results received frominformants’ subjective assessment of translation difficulty; (ii) moderate and positive correlations existed between most items inthe self-assessments and the indicator (fixation and saccade durations) obtained by the eye-tracking measurements; and (iii) theinformants’ cognitive load as indicated by fixation and saccade durations (but not for pupil size) increased significantly in twoof the three texts along with the increase in source text complexity.
