Productivity and lexical pragmatic features in a contemporary CAT
environment: an exploratory study in English to Japanese
Moorkens, JossORCID: 0000-0003-0766-0071 and Sasamoto, RyokoORCID: 0000-0002-1644-6897
(2017)
Productivity and lexical pragmatic features in a contemporary CAT
environment: an exploratory study in English to Japanese.
Hermes – Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 56
.
pp. 111-123.
ISSN 0904-1699
As the translation profession has become more technologized, translators increasingly work within an interface that
combines translation from scratch, translation memory suggestions, machine translation post-editing, and terminological
resources. This study analyses user activity data from one such interface, and measures temporal effort for English to
Japanese translation at the segment level. Using previous studies of translation within the framework of relevance
theory as a starting point, various features and edits were identified and annotated within the texts, in order to find
whether there was a relationship between their prevalence and translation effort. Although this study is exploratory in
nature, there was an expectation based on previous studies that procedurally encoded utterances would be associated
with greater translation effort. This expectation was complicated by the choice of a language pair in which there
has been little research applying relevance theory to translation, and by contemporary research that has made the
distinction between procedural and conceptual encoding appear more fluid than previously believed. Our findings are
that some features that lean more towards procedural encoding (such as prevalence of pronouns and manual addition
of postpositions) are associated with increased temporal effort, although the small sample size makes it impossible
to generalise. Segments translated with the aid of translation memory showed the least average temporal effort, and
segments translated using machine translation appeared to require more effort than translation from scratch.