Literality and cognitive effort: Japanese and Spanish

Literality and Cognitive Effort: Japanese and Spanish Isabel Lacruz, Michael Carl, Masaru Yamada Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, United States CRITT, Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark Kansai University, Osaka, Japan ilacruz@kent.edu, mc.ibc@cbs.dk, yamada@apple-eye.com Abstract We introduce a notion of pause-word ratio computed using ranges of pause lengths rather than lower cutoffs for pause lengths. Standard pause-word ratios are indicators of cognitive effort during different translation modalities.The pause range version allows for the study of how different types of pauses relate to the extent of cognitive effort and where it occurs in the translation process. In this article we focus on short monitoring pauses and how they relate to the cognitive effort involved in translation and post-editing for language pairs that are different in terms of semantic and syntactic remoteness. We use data from the CRITT TPR database, comparing translation and post-editing from English to Japanese and from English to Spanish, and study the interaction of pause-word ratio for short pauses ranging between 300 and 500ms with syntactic remoteness, measured by the CrossS feature, semantic remoteness, measured by HTra, and syntactic and semantic remoteness, measured by Literality. Keywords: pause-word ratio, Literality, cognitive effort 1. Introduction The Multiling subset of the CRITT TPR-DB database (Carl et al., 2016a) provides a large corpus of translation process data that facilitates comparisons across different languages and different translation modalities. It assembles user activity data obtained from translation tasks into several languages using a common set of six short English source texts. In particular, keystroke and eye tracking data were recorded during from-scratch translation sessions and during post-editing of machine translations. In this paper, we focus on translation and post-editing data from the BML12 study for English-to-Spanish (Mesa-Lao, 2014) and the ENJA15 study for English to Japanese (Carl et al., 2016b). By introducing refinements of the pause- word ratio measure of cognitive effort (Lacruz and Shreve, 2014) given by different ranges of pause lengths, we identify different patterns of cognitive effort for the two language pairs. These point to possible differences in the translation process when languages are more or less remote from each other that merit systematic investigation. These differences are potentially of interest to researchers in Natural Language Processing and Text- to-Speech synthesis. In terms of language structure, Spanish is much closer to English than Japanese is to English. It is therefore to be expected that translation related tasks will be more effortful for English>Japanese than for English>Spanish. In addition, typed production of Japanese using an input method editor (IME) is more complex, and so more effortful, than typed production of Spanish. The expected extra effort involved in English>Japanese translation tasks as compared to English>Spanish translation tasks has been confirmed, for example in Carl et al. (2016b) and Schaeffer et al. (2016). Linguistic complexity, as opposed to typing complexity, is a factor that contributes to increased cognitive effort expended on translation tasks (Dragsted, 2011). One type of complexity arises from translation entropy, which is computed by HTra in the CRITT TPR database. Translation entropy …

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