Readers have to work harder to understand a badly translated text: An eye-tracking study into the effects of translation errors

Data repository for this paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2024.2418016 available in Open Access License: CC-By Attribution 4.0. The research reported in this paper is part of The Read Me Project (Reading and Reception of Mediated (Translated) text) financed by the National Science Centre Poland UMO-2020/39/B/HS2/00697.

The data used for analysis are in the FILES folder which includes: 1). the eye-tracking measures and sentence comprehension data; 2) LHQ and LexTALE scores used to describe the participant profiles; 3) texts used as experimental stimuli.
Article abstract:

Texts are translated to be read and provide access to otherwise inaccessible information or experiences. Scant empirical interest in how translations are read and received by readers is surprising in the context of our knowledge about the features of translations, and the systematic ways in which they differ from originals. In this paper, we explore the impact of translation quality on the reading experience (cognitive effort involved in reading, and comprehension). Two groups of participants (n=64) were eye-tracked as they read either a low-quality translation (with errors) or a high-quality translation (without errors) of the same text, a product description. Overall, the errors contributed to longer dwell time when reading the entire text but did not significantly affect the participants’ comprehension scores. A more fine-grained analysis of the impact of translation errors on the reading experience shows that it depends on the amount of confusion errors cause in the meaning integration processes responsible for building a coherent model of the entire text.