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Article published In: Interpreting
Vol. 21:2 (2019) ► pp.196–219

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Text characteristics, perceived difficulty and task performance in sight translation

An exploratory study of university-level students

 | Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Published online: 11 November 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.00027.wu
Abstract
This paper reports on an exploratory study examining the relationship between text characteristics, perceived difficulty and task performance in sight translation (ST). Twenty-nine undergraduate interpreters were asked to sight-translate six texts with different properties. Correlation analysis shows that Sophisticated Word Type and Mean Length of a T-unit are, respectively, the lexical and the syntactic variables having the highest correlations with all the three dependent variables (i.e. perceived difficulty, accuracy and fluency in ST performance). Surprisingly, the discoursal variables are weakly or modestly correlated with the dependent variables. Thematic analysis of the students’ reflective essays points to two hypothesized causal links among the three Ps in ST: task properties may cause decoding difficulties and cognitive overload in the cognitive process, which in turn lead to inaccuracy and dysfluency in ST performance. The research findings lend empirical support to the “shallow-scan hypothesis” in previous research. Finally, this study proposes a three-tier conceptual framework to inform and guide future research to operationalize variables in ST empirical studies. The pedagogical implications of ST are also discussed.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Text characteristics, readability and task complexity
    • 2.1Text characteristics and readability
    • 2.2Text characteristics and task complexity in language tasks
    • 2.3Text characteristics and ST task complexity
  • 3.Research design
    • 3.1Research questions
    • 3.2Participants
    • 3.3Directionality
    • 3.4Source texts
    • 3.5Procedure
    • 3.6Variables and analytical procedure
      • Lexical variables
      • Syntactic variables
      • Discoursal variables
      • Benchmark variable
      • Perceived difficulty
      • Task performance
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Quantitative analysis
    • 4.2Qualitative analysis
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Relationship between text properties, cognitive process and ST performance
    • 5.2Discoursal variables
    • 5.3Flesch score
    • 5.4Pedagogical implications
      • 5.4.1Difficulty manipulation
      • 5.4.2Limitations of ST in interpreter training
    • 5.5Research implications
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
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