A Behavioral Protocol for Assessing Cognitive Effort and Strategic Revision in English-Chinese Translation and Sight Interpreting Tasks

This article presents a comprehensive behavioral protocol designed to assess cognitive effort and strategic revision during English-Chinese written translation and sight interpreting. The methodology integrates multimodality data collection—including keystroke logging, screen recording, audio recording, and verbatim transcription—to accurately capture real-time translation processes. Furthermore, a standardized coding framework is introduced to classify and evaluate revision and self-repair behaviors objectively. To validate the efficacy of the protocol, 62 participants, categorized into novice and trained groups, completed counterbalanced written translation and sight interpreting tasks. The application of the protocol successfully differentiated performance levels: trained participants exhibited significantly higher output quality scores in both written translation (20.1 ± 2.1 versus 16.8 ± 2.3) and sight interpreting (18.9 ± 2.4 versus 15.4 ± 2.6). The protocol also captured distinct behavioral markers, revealing that trained participants demonstrated higher rates of effective revision and self-repair. Mixed-effects modeling applied to the extracted behavioral data confirmed that training background positively predicted overall output quality (β = 2.84, p < 0.001), whereas pause burden was negatively associated with quality. Ultimately, this protocol provides a reproducible and rigorous framework for quantifying cognitive effort and evaluating self-monitoring strategies in bilingual processing tasks.