Analysing the impact of TAPs on temporal, technical and cognitive effort in monolingual post-editing

ABSTRACT

This study analyses the impact of TAPs on effort in monolingual post-editing tasks involving two machine-translated texts from English into Brazilian Portuguese. The analysis focuses on indicators of temporal effort (task execution time, text production time, total pause time, and pause count), technical effort (numbers of insertions, deletions, navigation and return keystrokes, copy/cut-and-paste keystrokes, and mouse operations, as well as the total number of keystrokes and mouse operations), and cognitive effort (average fixation duration, fixation count, total gaze time, average pupil size, and duration of the longest fixation). Results from 43 participants indicate that temporal, technical and cognitive aspects of effort are significantly influenced by verbalization, i.e., the TAP condition, on the basis of 13 indicators: all four indicators of temporal effort, four out of seven indicators of technical effort (numbers of insertions, deletions, and mouse operations, and the total number of keystrokes and mouse operations), and all five indicators of cognitive effort. The results also point out that the impact of TAPs on post-editing effort does not depend on participants’ translation experience.

KEYWORDS:

• TAPs
• temporal effort
• technical effort
• cognitive effort
• monolingual post-editing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Norma Barbosa de Lima Fonseca is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Graduate Program in Letters: Language Studies at Federal University of Ouro Preto (UFOP), where she develops empirical-experimental research in Translation Studies, and a professor at the Federal Center for Technological Education of Minas Gerais (CEFET-MG). She obtained a PhD and a Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics from the Graduate Program in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics (POSLIN) at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). Her bachelor’s degree in English and Portuguese Languages was received from Federal University of Viçosa (UFV).

ORCID

Norma Barbosa de Lima Fonseca http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0207-4789

Notes

1. The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the author, [NBLF]. The data are not publicly available due to them containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

2. Gaze is defined as the ‘absolute position of the eyes in space and depends on both the eye position in orbit and the head position in space’ (Schmid & Zambarbieri, 1991, p. 229), while fixations, a kind of gaze behavior, refers to ‘pauses over informative regions of interest.’

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES).