Dynamic pause assessment of keystroke logged data for the detection of complexity in translation and monolingual text production

Abstract

Pause analysis of key-stroke logged translations is a hallmark of process based translation studies. However, an exact definition of what a cognitively effortful pause during the translation process is has not been found yet (Saldanha and O'Brien, 2013). This paper investigates the design of a key-stroke and subject dependent identification system of cognitive effort to track complexity in translation with keystroke logging (cf. also (Dragsted, 2005) (Couto-Vale, in preparation)). It is an elastic measure that takes into account idiosyncratic pause duration of translators as well as further confounds such as bi-gram frequency, letter frequency and some motor tasks involved in writing. The method is compared to a common static threshold of 1000 ms in an analysis of cognitive effort during the translation of grammatical functions from English to German. Additionally, the results are triangulated with eye tracking data for further validation. The findings show that at least for smaller sets of data a dynamic pause assessment may lead to more accurate results than a generic static pause threshold of similar duration.

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