THE TRANSLATION OF THE MODAL PARTICLE WOHL INTO PORTUGUESE: AN INVESTIGATION OF THE PROCESSING EFFORT OF BRAZILIANS AND GERMANS PARTICIPANTS

Abstract Using the Relevance Theory as guideline we investigate the processing effort of the modal particle (MP) wohl in the linguistic pair german/portuguese in post-editing tasks. As experimental background, we use three distinct research tools: the program Translog-II; the eyetracker Tobii T60; retrospective reports (free and guided). Sixteen participants, eight Brazilian and eight German, post-edited to Portuguese three machine translation inputs in German containing the MP wohl in three different positions related to the same sentence. The results here presented tend to confirm the hypothesis by GUTT (1998) and the study on processing analysis performed by ALVES (2007), which show that the relation between effort and effect does not obey a linear relation among themselves. Therefore, the analysis of how modal particles are processed in post-editing tasks tends to show that different cognitive environments imply distinct allocation of the minimum cognitive effort needed to achieve a relevant contextual effect.