Study compares ways to measure effort in translation by timing pauses

Replicating a Disjoint-Set Union Experiment over Various Notions of Micro Units to assess Translation Effort

Computation and Language

Summary

This study looks at how people translate texts by measuring the pauses they take while working. The authors tried different ways to divide these pauses into small and big chunks to see which method shows how hard the task is. They found that looking at the translation process itself might give better clues about the effort involved than just timing pauses. Their work helps us understand how to better track the difficulty of translating texts.

translation effortdisjoint-set unionmicro unitsmacro unitspause thresholdsediting procedurestext productionprocess-based units

Authors

Michael Carl

Abstract

The paper describes a replication experiment to assess "the distribution of editing procedures across micro and macro units as an indicator of the strain of text production". We investigate various pause thresholds to isolate Micro and Macro units and conclude that process-based units might be more suitable entity.