A cognitive inquiry into similarities and differences between translation and paraphrase: Evidence from eye movement data

Abstract

Intralingual translation has long been peripheral to empirical studies of translation. Considering its many similarities with interlingual translation, also described as translation proper, we adopted eye-tracking technology to investigate the cognitive process during translation and paraphrase, an exemplification of intralingual translation. Twenty-four postgraduate students were required to perform four types of tasks (Chinese paraphrase, English-Chinese translation, English paraphrase, Chinese-English translation) for source texts (ST) of different genres. Their eye movements were recorded for analysis of the cognitive effort and attention distribution pattern. The result demonstrated that: (1) Translation elicited significantly greater cognitive efforts than paraphrase; (2) Differences between translation and paraphrase on cognitive effort were modulated by text genre and target language; (3) Translation and paraphrase did not differ strikingly in terms of attention distribution. This process-oriented study confirmed higher cognitive efforts in inter-lingual translation, which was likely due to the additional complexity of bilingual transfer. Moreover, it revealed significant modulating effects of text genre and target language.