Global and Local Cognitive Processing in Paraphrasing and Translation: A Comparative Studies Using Eye-tracking and Retrospective Protocols

Intralingual translation is an essential linguistic mediation that facilitates the interpretation of meaning, and paraphrasing is a typical case in point. While paraphrasing exercise has found wide application from translation training to language learning, little attention has been paid to its cognitive processes in texts with different textual and sentential features. Considering its resemblance to interlingual translation, we conducted a comparative study to investigate the text- and sentence-level cognitive processes during translation and paraphrasing using eye-tracking and retrospective protocols. Sixteen student translators were invited to perform translation (English-Chinese) and paraphrasing (in English) tasks. The experimental texts were selected in different genres and included sentences with different difficulty levels. Their eye movements were recorded as indicators of cognitive load and attention shift pattern, and retrospective interviews were conducted to uncover their mental processing more explicitly. The results showed that 1) In the textual level, English-Chinese (E-C) translation and English paraphrasing induced comparable overall cognitive load during the comprehension process and showed a similar pattern of attention shift, whereas, in target text production, English Paraphrasing elicited an increased cognitive load which may result from an additional burden of the second language (L2) production as well as a lack of subliminal semantic bilingual priming; 2) The effect of genre on the text-level cognitive load differed significantly between E-C translation and English paraphrasing, indicating a genre-specific strategy which is more salient in translation; 3) In the sentence level, sentence difficulty affected the cognitive load during both tasks especially E-C translation, and 4) the effect of sentence difficulty on two tasks was also modulated by the text genre. This interaction effect is possibly due to a shallow processing strategy in paraphrasing difficult sentences, which is more applicable in tourism texts. These findings provided preliminary evidence for the shared ground and differences in cognitive processes between translation and paraphrasing. Meanwhile, they revealed the vital role of several influential factors such as text genre, sentence difficulty, and language proficiency.