Assessing Pause Thresholds for empirical Translation Process Research

TL;DR

This paper compares three recent methods for determining pause thresholds in translation process research and introduces a new approach for identifying production unit breaks.

Contribution

It evaluates existing methods and proposes a novel technique for better identifying translation process segments based on keystroke pauses.

Findings

Compared three recent pause threshold computation methods.

Proposed and evaluated a new method for identifying production unit breaks.

Provided insights into the relationship between keystroke pauses and translation difficulties.

Abstract

Text production (and translations) proceeds in the form of stretches of typing, interrupted by keystroke pauses. It is often assumed that fast typing reflects unchallenged/automated translation production while long(er) typing pauses are indicative of translation problems, hurdles or difficulties. Building on a long discussion concerning the determination of pause thresholds that separate automated from presumably reflective translation processes (O'Brien, 2006; Alves and Vale, 2009; Timarova et al., 2011; Dragsted and Carl, 2013; Lacruz et al., 2014; Kumpulainen, 2015; Heilmann and Neumann 2016), this paper compares three recent approaches for computing these pause thresholds, and suggest and evaluate a novel method for computing Production Unit Breaks.