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Abstract
This study tests the time course of language activation in reading for translation. Reading for translation has been modeled vertically (two monolingual systems activated serially), horizontally (both monolingual systems automatically activated in parallel), and as some blend of these perspectives. Schaeffer, Dragsted, Hvelplund, Balling, and Carl (2016b) provided evidence supporting early horizontal processing in reading for translation. Translators displayed longer first fixations when a word (for example, Spanish grande) had been translated in more than one way (big and large in English). This has a parallel in monolingual studies, where all meanings of polysemous words can automatically be considered or accessed at an early stage (Onifer & Swinney, 1981).
In the context of reading for translation, these findings suggest the study of words that are polysemous in the source language (for example, Spanish dedo), but where each meaning has a distinct translation in the target language (finger and toe in English). The horizontal model predicts automatic early activation of all translations of such words in the target language. On the other hand, the vertical model argues against early activation of target language words.
One experiment, using eye tracking methodology, and one observational study, based on the extensive CRITT database of recordings of different translation tasks in several language pairs, were carried out to investigate the influence of dual language activation on reading for translation. To study the effects of cross-linguistic polysemy, participants sight translated sentences with ambiguous and non-ambiguous control words in neutral context. The observational analysis completed the experimental data by focusing on an English-Spanish subset of the CRITT database to assess how word translation entropy, a measure of variability of word translations in actual translation output, influenced the length of first fixation durations on a source text. Results at the micro-scale (one language pair, one translation modality) replicated to some extent macro-scale (six language pairs, four translation modalities) results and open the way for further research.
