2024/11/13 by Bogusława Whyatt, Ewa Tomczak, Olga Witczak +1 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Computer Science · Arts and Humanities · #Text Readability and Simplification #Translation Studies and Practices #Natural Language Processing Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/0907676x.2024.2418016
openalex publication_date 2024/11/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Texts are translated to be read and provide access to otherwise inaccessible information or experiences. Scant empirical interest in how translations are read and received by readers is surprising in the context of our knowledge about the features of translations, and the systematic ways in which they differ from originally written texts. In this paper, we explore the impact of translation quality on the reading experience by analysing the cognitive effort involved in reading and text comprehension. Two groups of participants (n = 64) were eye-tracked as they read either a low-quality translation (with errors) or a high-quality translation (without errors) of the same source text. Overall, the errors contributed to longer dwell time when reading the entire text but did not significantly affect the participants’ comprehension scores. A more in-depth analysis of the impact of translation errors on the reading experience shows that it depends on the amount of confusion errors cause to the reader when building a coherent model of the entire text.