Data on the Process of Task Completion

Data related to observation of the process centres on the task time of different stages of the experiment and the number of times the experimental participants used external sources, e.g. online dictionaries, Google Translate and consultation of exercise-related websites. The version of the screen recorder used for the experiment does not support automatic logging of pauses. Instead of pauses, task time was used to note the difficulty of each section, even though pauses might be caused by other factors. Besides the difficulty of the task itself, several other

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factors causing prolongation of the task time are equally indicated. The relevance of information on the process of task completion was to enable us to gain more insight into some of the series of decisions that led to participants’ choices that culminated in the answers they provided. Furthermore, it has become necessary to include this information to properly determine how certain behaviours are related to the quality of outputs and to determine which of those behaviours are time-efficient. This information is presented in Table 4.1, and explained later.

Table 4.1: Information on participants’ process of task completion

Parti- cipants Initial reading task time Graph- plotting task time Part of text-comprehension

exercise task time Translation task time Total task time Number of external lookups Q2 Q4 Q7 Q8 PA1 10:37 09:19 06:08 04:09 01:27 02:07 27:08 79:27 17 PA2 08:16 09:22 06:02 03:12 04:33 03:32 49:35 99:20 43 PA3 11:08 19:27 05:21 04:27 03:39 05:23 38:12 97:54 30 PA4 04:23 17:16 10:37 06:19 02:01 04:21 36:07 76:24 53 PA5 15:07 37:36 09:05 01:04 01:37 03:05 35:04 114:13 33+GT PA6 02:01 13:22 08:13 00:13 00:07 01:22 13:04 48:37 0 PA7 04:16 19:06 12:52 03:01 02:26 02:19 13:47 100:38 67 PB1 03:16 33:21 05:33 02:38 03:17 20:39 84:52 30 PB2 11:25 15:54 04:03 00:42 03:36 50:07 103:05 42 PB3 Zero 16:14 15:07 03:05 07:56 30:15 104:54 30 + GT PB4 15:32 21:12 04:05 04:06 03:19 39:09 103:22 36 PB5 08:07 21:16 07:07 02:05 06:12 28:18 93:38 12 + GT PB6 05:01 03:23 05:06 01:00 03:37 43:15 93:37 87 PB7 04:03 17:37 03:00 03:37 07:14 63:38 107:12 38+GT

As indicated, Table 4.1 shows data retrieved from recordings of participants regarding task time and the number of times participants made online searches to help them either understand the ST or write up answers to comprehension questions and to produce the translation. The first column after the list of participants (Initial reading task time) shows how long it took each participant to execute Task 1. The first task instructed students to read the text (reproduced below for ease of reference) before proceeding to either graphically represent portions of the text (Group A) or to answer the comprehension questions (Group B).

De retour aux affaires, enfin. Gilles Pélisson a dû savourer l’instant quand Martin Bouygues lui a proposé cet été le fauteuil de grand manitou de TF1. Cela faisait cinq ans que l’ancien patron d’Accor attendait un poste à sa mesure. Débarqué en novembre 2010 de la présidence du groupe hôtelier fondé par son oncle Gérard Pélisson (pour «divergences stratégiques» avec ses actionnaires), l’ambitieux quinqua rongeait son frein depuis, entre la direction d’un fonds d’investissement, deux ou trois jetons de présence dans des conseils d’administration (dont celui de la Une), un rond de serviette au conseil exécutif du Medef et quelques missions sur «le tourisme d’affaires».

Ce mercredi, le grand jour est arrivé, dès la clôture de la Bourse, TF1 a officialisé la nouvelle: Gilles Pélisson succédera bien le 19 février à l’actuel PDG du groupe audiovisuel, Nonce Paolini, invité à prendre sa retraite à 66 ans bien sonnés.

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S’installer au quatorzième étage de la tour TF1 et regarder dans les yeux la France de Jean-Pierre Pernaut et de l’ex-«ménagère de moins de 50 ans» ? Pélisson en rêvait, lui qui en 2008, déjà, avait voulu prendre la barre du navire-amiral télévisuel du groupe Bouygues. Sans succès.

A l’époque, en passant en revue ses chers compagnons du Minorange, «Martin» avait préféré au super «Bouygues Boy» l’homme du sérail TF1, Nonce Paolini, ancien DRH, dircom et DG de la chaîne. Plus jeune mais plus capé que le fidèle corse, le bien-né Gilles Pélisson pouvait pourtant mettre en avant un CV de boss du CAC 40 déjà long comme le bras : après avoir fait ses armes chez Novotel au sein du groupe familial, ce diplômé de l’Essec et titulaire d’un MBA de Harvard avait dirigé successivement Euro Disney et Bouygues Telecom avant de revenir prendre les rênes du groupe Accor en 2006. Mais, bien que proche de Martin Bouygues, l’ambitieux Pélisson souffrait d’un gros handicap : le pro de l’hôtellerie et des forfaits mobiles ne connaissait pas grand-chose au monde de la télévision

Thus, the participants were expected to read the text first before performing other exercises. However, Table 4.1 shows that PB3 did not engage in any form of initial reading of the text before subsequent exercises. Instead, she incorporated reading the ST into her performance of the text-comprehension exercises. This type of behaviour has not been without theoretical consideration. Screen (2016:2) for example reports that it is customary for certain translators to ignore reading the entire text before engaging in the translation but prefer to read sections of a segment and translate each individually. Contrary to the norm in pause research which involves counting from the moment the first key is struck, task time in this research begins – especially for the text-comprehension task – when the student starts reading the question. The argument is that the brain starts processing (and proposing answers to) the question once the question is read. In the case of PB3, she went ahead to read the first question before coming back to read the text. She started answering the questions the moment she found the first answer.

The next column indicates the time it took Group A to represent textual information in graphs. Group B was not instructed to complete this task. As highlighted elsewhere in this dissertation, it was assumed that these textual representations would play a significant role in the manner in which Group A participants would process the text, and at the same time influence the answers they would provide in response to the text-comprehension question and, by implication, their translations. The students answered a total number of 10 comprehension questions, which included the following:

1. Mention the names of the people cited in text.

2. Say, as much as you can find from the text, the jobs they do or did. 3. Name the person about whom the text gives the most information.

4. 2010, 2008 and 2006. What connections have these years with the principal character in the text?

5. Gilles Pélisson a dû savourer l’instant quand Martin Bouygues lui a proposé cet été le fauteuil de grand manitou de TF1. What information does this sentence provide ?

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6. What information does this portion of the sentence introduce? …l’ambitieux quinqua rongeait son frein…

7. Plus jeune mais plus capé que le fidèle corse, … What specific insights does this portion of the text offer you regarding the profiles of the characters mentioned? 8. l’ancien patron d’Accor and l’ambitieux quinqua are co-referential to one of the

characters in the text. There are, at least, three other similar expressions in the last paragraph (apart from the name) that refer to the same individual. Identify two of them and who that individual is.

9. What does the reader come to know about this Pélisson from this sentence? l’ambitieux Pélisson souffrait d’un gros handicap

10. What title would you suggest for this text?

It was, however, not expected that exposure or non-exposure to graphs would necessarily play any significant role in participants’ responses to all the questions. As I have argued in their relevant subsections, only four of these ten questions were deliberately set to investigate participants’ detailed comprehension of the ST and to determine whether or not these comprehension processes were affected by exposure and/or non-exposure to visualisation. The questions include numbers 2, 4, 7 and 8. The selection of the four questions, as mirror to participants’ in-depth comprehension and translation ability, was based on the assumption that only complex, thought-provoking questions would pose (significant) comprehension challenges. As can be seen in the data presented below, the questions which demand higher processing effort were considered capable of determining the extent to which the use of visual language was helpful.

While reporting on the performance of the subjects on each comprehension question, consideration was first given to the number of correct and incorrect answers the subjects provided. Commentaries on their responses to the questions were also made against the number of dictionary lookups during this phase so that the reader would form a general idea about how each participant responded to the questions, and how this has played a role in the quality of their responses. Additionally, based on previous process-research findings on the relationship between task complexity and processing time (cf. Jakobsen & Jensen 2008; Jakobsen 2011; Carl, Dragsted & Jakobsen 2013; Zapata 2016, etc.), the rate at which each participant found the questions complex or simple were equally examined against the duration of time it took participants to complete the tasks related to each question. Examining the responses against task duration does not suggest that other factors have played no role in how long it took participants to complete the tasks. Finally, I also studied the video recordings and the subjects’ verbal protocols to examine their general task-execution behaviours. Some of these behaviours that were considered to be of interest to the explanation of participants’ performances are discussed at their relevant (sub)sections.

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The remaining six questions, Questions 1, 3, 5, 6, 9 and 10, which are presented in Section 4.3.2, were considered less difficult, and were assumed to not involve any explicitly systematic processing efforts. However, the ability to answer these questions was envisaged to reveal the overall, global understanding of the text. Since these six questions are of a global nature, the way the students responded to them was not given any special consideration. The results obtained by the participants are presented, though.

The next column in Table 4.1 contains the data on translation task time, that is, how long it took students to complete the last task of the experiment. The last two columns show the duration of all the exercises put together and the number of times each participant consulted online reference sources. No breaks were given between the end and beginning of the different phases of the experiment, so that the entire exercise was performed in one sitting. Although students were instructed to consult any online source of their choice, there was no instruction to copy and paste the entire text into Google Translate and perform a post-editing exercise. Some of the students who used Google Translate, such as PA5, PB3, PB5 and PB7, had GT indicated alongside the number of online sources they consulted. PA6 said she forgot that the consultation of online sources was allowed in the experiment. For this reason, she happened to be the only candidate to have responded to the questions in less than one hour because she did not consult any external sources.

The information on task time presented in Table 4.1 only include those pauses used for better processing of the task; it does not include pauses for any other reason than performing the task at hand. These participants’ average total task time was recorded in order to show how the two groups compare. Figure 4.1 presents an overview of participants’ total task duration.

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Figure 4.1: Overview of data on task time

Figure 4.1 shows that Group A spent a total of 616 minutes 33 seconds, while Group B had a total task time of 690 minutes 40 seconds. This is an average of 88 minutes and 4 seconds for Group A and 98 minutes and 40 seconds for Group B. Although the activities are recorded down to a millisecond, I restricted the tracking to minutes and seconds to ensure uniformity as pauses were not automatically tracked. Figure 4.1 therefore indicates that Group A members took an average of nine minutes less than Group B members to complete the entire task. Arranging the members according to their levels of linguistic competence in the source language (as indicated in Table 1.2), a comparison of the participants’ task time is shown in Figure 4.2.

Figure 4.2: Participants’ comparison on task time 576:00:00 588:00:00 600:00:00 612:00:00 624:00:00 636:00:00 648:00:00 660:00:00 672:00:00 684:00:00 696:00:00 708:00:00 Group A Group B 0:00:00 24:00:00 48:00:00 72:00:00 96:00:00 120:00:00 Group A Group B

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Figure 4.2 shows that when each member of one group is compared with his/her counterpart in the other group, only PA3 and PA5 took longer than their counterparts in Group B to complete the tasks (please refer to Table 1.2 for ease of referencing). For the five other pairs, Group B members spent more time during the experiment. The reason why PA5 had a longer task time than PB7 probably stems from her lack of commitment while PA3, as will become apparent in Section 4.3.1.1, was a meticulous student who preferred to be careful with the amount of information she provided in order not to get the answers wrong. The process data indicates that she spent several minutes processing the text segment relevant to each question before moving to another. From Figures 4.1 and 4.2, we notice that members of Group B spent more time performing the experiment than those of Group A.

Another way the data was considered was by examining the percentage of total task time spent on the translation phase of the experiment. For this reason, the data was also calculated and secured in a chart to compare each member of the two groups on how they spent their time in the two phases of the experiment, namely text comprehension and translation. Figure 4.3 focuses on the percentage of task time spent on translation.

Figure 4.3: Participants’ comparison on translation task time

The numbers at the top of the columns in Figure 4.3 show the percentage of total task time that each participant spent on the translation task. The figure reveals no specific pattern showing one group spending more time on translation than the other. The reason for this is due to the highly individualistic nature of the actual translation task. Each translator has a peculiar working style making it impossible for any of them to dedicate the same duration of time to a

26.88 34.15 13.7 47.27 49.92 39.02 30.7 23.65 30.22 37.88 48.62 28.84 46.2 59.36 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 Group A Group B

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specific stage of the exercise. This divergence of text-processing styles stems from the fact that translation is a highly complex activity (Angelelli 2009:24). Scholars have identified different categories of translators based on how they approach the process. For example, Dragsted and Carl’s review of writing and translation literature has identified several translation behaviours:

On the basis of an analysis of gaze activity and keystrokes, we have arrived at categorisations of translator behaviour during initial orientation (into head-starters, quick-planners, scanners and systematic planners), during drafting (into narrow- context planners, broad-context planners and sentence planners as well as into translators with or without consistent backtracking behaviour), and during revision (into online revisers, end revisers, and constant revisers). We have found support in the data that translator behaviour remains relatively constant across texts of varying complexity, and that one may thus postulate that translators are characterised by individual translator profiles which are independent of text complexity (hypothesis 1), and possibly also of other external factors. For instance, we might characterise a translator, in terms of translator profile, as being a head-starter, a narrow-context planner, a backtracker, and an online planner.

Dragsted and Carl (2013:148-149)

In addition to the lack of a specific pattern among participants of the two groups regarding time distribution, there is an equally important observation from Figure 4.3. All the participants (apart from PB7) spent less than 50% of their sitting time on the translation phase of the experiment. This observation is not unexpected as they have overcome most of the comprehension problems of the ST at the reading-comprehension stage. (Since reading during the initial stage of the experiment was for the more intentional purpose of answering comprehension problems, it flows naturally that most of the cognitive resources were expended at the initial stage of the experiment.) Furthermore, although there is no specific pattern showing that each member of one group spent most of the task time on the translation phase when compared with his/her counterpart in the other group, Group B members spent an average of 39% of the time translating as opposed to Group A’s 34.5%. A possible explanation for this 4.5% difference is that Group A members had two different tasks to complete (plotting the graphs and answering the comprehension questions) before commencing with the translation task. Hvelplund (2011:193) finds that cognitive load during translation is considered to be higher for student translators than for professional translators, irrespective of the type of processing. Since spending more time performing a task can signify that more processing effort is expended on the task, it is not surprising that the two initial tasks helped to make the translation task easier. Further support for this assumption is provided by Jääskeläinen (1996:67 in Denver 2007:224). She found that professional translators direct a greater part of their attention to text comprehension than translators with little experience, who tend to focus more on linguistic problem-solving. While the participants of the two groups are not

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professional translators, the greater attention directed by Group A (instanced by the relatively longer amount of time spent) on the ST-comprehension phase might be indicative of their tendency towards exhibiting certain expert behaviours.

Finally, information in the last column of Table 4.1, which focuses on dictionary use, is described in Figure 4.4.

Figure 4.4: Participants’ comparison on dictionary use

In Figure 4.4, the numbers at the top of the columns represent the number of times participants searched an online dictionary or used Google Translate. PA6 did not use any dictionary. This candidate might be considered an outlier because her performance in this observation compares abnormally to other values in this sample. For this reason, the mean number of dictionary lookups for Group A was divided by six participants instead of seven. This resulted in an average lookup of 49 for Group A while those of Group B was 63. These figures therefore reveal that apart from PA4 and PA7 who had more lookups than their counterparts in Group B, the rest of Group A members had an average of 29 lookups less than Group B members. Therefore, Group A participants’ general reliance on online resources in performing their tasks was minimal compared to those of Group B members.

The rest of the chapter features information on the reading-comprehension test.

0 17 67 53 43 30 83 44 62 36 42 80 87 88 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Group A Group B

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