Translating the violent content of grimm brothers' fairy tales: An eye-tracker experiment

Abstract

Eye tracking has been introduced as a tool to analyze cognitive processes of translators in recent years. Current research with eye tracker focuses on examining translation processes. As far as we know, however, this tool has not been used for detecting eye movement behaviors related to the cognitive processing of violent content in the source text (ST). As research in this area is emerging, this study aims to determine if semantic associations with violent actions or activities in the ST produces a response in the gaze behavior of the translator. This paper presents an experimental study to investigate the cognitive processes involved in the translation of three condensed versions of Grimm brothers' fairy tales. The selected texts present the range of violent content for which these tales are renowned, from more modern adaptations which remove the violent content to very explicit and graphicly violent stories. Texts were translated from Spanish (L2) into English (L1). Fixation counts and fixation duration were calculated for each participant in ten Areas of Interest (AOI) which represented challenges in translating various aspects of grammar and violence presented in these tales.