Impact of translation difficulty and working memory capacity on processing of translation units: evidence from Chinese-to-English translation

ABSTRACT

This study aims to examine how the source text’s (ST) translation difficulty and subject’s working memory (WM) capacity impact the number and size of translation units (TUs). Based on the data collected through key-logging of 38 students translating two relatively easy and difficult texts, the number of production TUs (PTU) at all levels and sizes of average production TU (APTU) were calculated and compared. It was found that while translating the difficult text, the subjects used more 1-to-6-word TUs, but their APTU sizes were not clearly reduced. The number of PTUs at each level did not vary with WM capacity in the translation of either the easy or the difficult text, but the APTU size of subjects with high WM capacity was larger than that of those with low WM capacity. However, in the translation of the difficult text, the size of APTU of subjects with high WM capacity was significantly reduced compared to those with low WM capacity, thus neutralizing the difference between the two groups in the translation of the relatively easy text.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation unit
• translation difficulty
• working memory capacity

Acknowledgements

We must thank the editor-in-chief and the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their insightful comments and suggestions, without which the paper could not have reached the present form.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on the contributor

Fuxiang Wang is Professor of Translation Studies at Qufu Normal University, China. He obtained his PhD from Shanghai International Studies University. His research interests include segmentation in translation, recursiveness, translationese, translation strategy, and corpus-based translation studies, among others.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [grant number 15BYY023], and it is also part of the project ‘Digital Humanities and Foreign Language Research’ developed within the research group (Shandong Provincial Young Scholars Innoavation Team).