UNRAVELLING THE PROCESSING UNITS OF TRANSLATION

This is a quantitative study which compares pauses found during translating a text with those found in monolingual text production. The data was collected from 28 professional translators. Each subject wrote an informative presentation in Finnish and a translation from English into Finnish using the Trans log keystroke logging software. The processing units of individual subjects were determined by statistically testing which linguistic units differed significantly from the surrounding units with regard to the preceding pause length. Results show that I) the processing units of individual subjects vary a lot, 2) the processing of monolingual text production does not predict the processing of translation and 3) the most conspicuous differences between translation and monolingual text production seem to appear at the level of syntactic processing.