Cognitive Effort Verbalised in Self-reports: Investigating the  Influence of Directionality in Translation

Marcelina Pietryga

Cognitive Effort Verbalised in Self-reports: Investigating the Influence of Directionality in Translation

Marcelina Pietryga

Abstract

This study investigates the traces of cognitive effort in two translation directions, L1-L2 and L2-L1, verbalised in the self-reports. Its aim is two-fold: to analyse how translation trainees generally verbalise cognitive effort experienced during the translation process and to investigate whether there are any differences in self-reports of cognitive effort in two translation directions. Therefore, I formulated two research questions directly corresponding to the aims. The method used to study this topic is retrospection in the form of self-retrospection. Translation trainees were asked to first translate a text and then verbalise all conscious decisions they made during the translation process. The verbalisations, under the name of self-reports of cognitive effort were divided into eight categories. The results indicated that participants referred to various aspects of cognitive effort, such as effort related to the drafting phase (Jakobsen 2002), style, punctuation and collocations, which served as fixed points of interest. What is more, seven out of eight categories of self-reports, but with different frequencies, appear in both translation directions. In some cases, the content of the categories also differs in each direction. I used a non-parametric Wilcoxon test to verify whether these differences were statistically significant. In the case of two out of seven categories that appear in both directions, the difference reached the level of statistical significance.

Keywords

retrospection; self-reports; cognitive effort; directionality; trainees

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