Using a Product Metric to Identify Differential Cognitive Effort in Translation from Japanese to English and Spanish

Abstract

We examine the variability of Japanese-English and Japanese-Spanish translations at the level of bunsetsu, the smallest coherent linguistic units that sound natural as part of Japanese sentences. These are equivalents of chunks or phrases in English, linguistic units generally larger than a word but smaller than a sentence. We measure variability by adapting the widely studied word translation entropy metric HTra to the context of bunsetsu. Word translation entropy has been shown to correlate with various behavioral measures of cognitive effort during translation between several language pairs. Word translation entropy values also correlate for translations of the same English source texts into several languages. Here, we extend the range of prior findings to translations from Japanese, a very different source language to English. We exhibit significant correlations of word translation entropy values in Japanese-English and Japanese-Spanish translations of bunsetsu from the same source texts. In line with prior observations on comparability of cognitive effort exerted in translations from English to closely related European languages, we also find comparable average word translation entropy values at the bunsetsu level for translations from Japanese to English and to Spanish. Nevertheless, we exhibit examples where there are large differences between entropy values for translations of specific types of bunsetsu into English and Spanish, relating these differences to general characteristics of the languages, such as the degree of dependence on context to infer meaning. We propose that in appropriate circumstances, different levels of cognitive effort during the translation process can be identified through differences in the variability of the translation product