Speakers: Bogusława Whyatt, Olga Witczak, Ewa Tomczak-Łukaszewska, Olha Lehka-Paul, Maria Kuczek, and Agata Kucharska (Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
Time: 22 May 2024 at 13:15–14:15
Venue: Aula Hrynakowskiego, Collegium Heliodori Święcicki
Abstract:
In Cognitive Translation Studies, the reception of translated texts remains an acutely under-researched area, as if the readers for whom translations are produced did not matter (Kruger and Kruger 2017; Walker 2021). This is more surprising in view of the fact that Corpus Translation Studies have provided compelling evidence that translated language tends to differ from originally written language in a systematic way (Baker 1995; Laviosa 2002). For example, it is lexically less diverse and is prone to transfer errors – the so-called translationese.
In the Read Me project financed by the National Science Centre Poland (UMO – 2020/39/B/HS2/00697), we use eye-tracking to investigate how translated texts are read. In this talk, we will report on three stages of our project. Stage 1 involved investigating the relationship between the translator’s effort to produce a translation, its quality and the reader’s effort to understand the target text. Stage 2 focused on the reading process and narrative engagement in popular fiction translated from English into Polish. We investigated how text quality and text complexity, as well as the language background of the reader affect the eye movements and self-rated immersion into a narrative world. Stage 3 is currently being designed and tackles the big question whether reading the original and reading its translation offer a comparable reading experience. The experimental data are collected in the EYE-LANG lab at the Faculty of English. Our Team includes the following researchers: dr hab. Bogusława Whyatt (PI), dr Olga Witczak (Co-investigator), mgr Ewa Tomczak-Łukaszewska (Co-investigator), dr Olha Lehka-Paul (Co-investigator) and two former students at WA – mgr Maria Kuczek and mgr Agata Kucharska as research assistants. Both students were laureates of the Study@Research grant (UMO – 049/34/UAM/0014) awarded by ID–UB AMU, and wrote their MA theses working on Stage 2 of the Read Me Project. We will be happy to share our findings and methodological challenges we have faced when applying eye-tracking as our data collection tool.
