Towards a classification of translator profiles based on eye-tracking and keylogging data

Abstract

This article seeks to formulate translator profiles based on process data from keylogging and eye-tracking, while at the same time identifying features which are shared by all translators in a sample consisting of both students and professionals. Data have been collected from 12 professional translators and 12 graduate students translating three texts of varying complexity. We found that individual behavioural characteristics with respect to initial orientation in the source text (ST), online ST reading, and online and end revision remained relatively constant across texts of varying complexity, supporting our hypothesis that translator profiles can be observed which are independent of the difficulty of the translation task. The analysis of the data also indicated that translators could be grouped into broad categories of locally-oriented and globally-oriented translation styles, which are partly, though not entirely, comparable to styles known from writing research. We also identified shared features with respect to reading and revision behaviour during drafting. Common to all translators was that they looked beyond the source text word they were about to translate, and that they made revisions while drafting the translation.