Assessing Pause Thresholds for empirical Translation Process Research
This work addresses a methodological issue in translation process research, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing discussions without indicating broad impact.
This paper tackles the problem of determining pause thresholds to separate automated from reflective translation processes by comparing three recent approaches and proposing a novel method for computing Production Unit Breaks, but it does not report concrete numerical results.
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.