What's happening when nothing's happening? Combining eyetracking and keylogging to explore cognitive processing during pauses in translation production

Abstract

This article investigates whether a combination of eyetracking and keylogging can yield a better understanding of the cognitive processing that occurs during pauses in translation production. It analyses the interaction between a number of temporal and spatial variables associated with pausing (including pause duration, the syntactic location of the pause and reading behaviour during the pause). Eight third-year students of translation, translating from English to Afrikaans, translated a 180-word text while their keystrokes and eye movements were recorded. Pauses were defined by means of a predetermined cut-off point, and coded for the temporal and spatial variables above. The relationships between these variables form the focus of the analysis. The findings of the study point to a complex relationship between pause duration, the syntactic position of the pause, syntactic asymmetries between the languages involved, reading behaviour and cognitive effort.