Using Translation Process Data to Explore Explicitation and Implicitation through Discourse Connectives (2022)

Abstract: We look into English-German translation process data to analyse explicitation and implicitation phenomena of discourse connectives. For this, we use the database CRITT TPR-DB which contains translation process data with various features that elicit online translation behaviour. We explore the English-German part of the data for discourse connectives that are either omitted or inserted in the target, as well as cases when changing a weak signal to strong one, or the other way around. We determine several features that have an impact on cognitive effort during translation for explicitation and implicitation. Our results show that cognitive load caused by implicitation and explicitation may depend on the discourse connectives used, as well as on the strength and the type of the relations the connectives convey.

## introduction explicitation in translation is often defined as an increased usage of linking devices, such as discourse connectives. implicitation is an opposite phenomenon and means a decrease in the number of connectives used in translation because of frequent ommissions. both explicitation and implicitation belong to the phenomena of translationese @xcite @xcite . the latter have received an increased attention in multilingual language processing (see e.g. dutta @xcite @xcite . in this paper, we analyse explicitation and implicitaion phenomena from a cognitive perspective, i.e. looking into translation process data. the data under analysis is parallel, so that we are able to inspect the translational pairs of english discourse connectives in the sources and their translations into german. apart from taking into consideration omission or insertion of a connective, we also analylse transformation cases, when the degree of the explicitation signal is changed. the strength of the signal a connective conveys depends on the number and frequency of relations they may trigger (asr and demberg, 2012; crible, 2020): ambiguous connectives convey a weaker signal. we interpret translation from a weak signal connective, e.g. but in example (1-a) into a strong signal connective, e.g. jedoch in example (1-b), as explicitation. no explicitation (equivalence) is observed if connectives hold a signal of the same degree: but translated into aber in example (1-c). we start from the general cases of implicitation and explicitation (tokens marked by a syntactic parser as connectives left out or added in translation) and analyse three features of describing behaviour during translation: production (typing) pauses and reading time in translation unit. we also look at the probability of translation choices. then, we analyse translation patterns of the two selected connectives but and aber to trace the transformation pattern from connectives with a weaker signal to connectives with a stronger signal. in general, we assume that explicitation requires more cognitive effort from a translator, whereas implicitation or equivalence do not do so. at the same time, the more ambiguous a connective is, the higher a cognitive effort for its translation. so, ambiguity or the strength of a signal may also have an impact on a translator's behaviour. the remainder of the paper is organised as follows: in section 2, we briefly outline the related work. our methodology is explained in section 3. we describe the analyses performed in section 4. in section 5, we discuss the results and outline our plans for future work. ## related work explicitation in translation occurs when a translated text contains new linguistic units not present in the source or more specific linguistic units are used instead of more general units in the source @xcite . explicitation or implicitation through discourse connectives (as increased or reduced usage of discourse connectives, @xcite , as well as the factors influencing these phenomena, have been analysed in various studies on both human and machine translation (see @xcite @xcite . there are studies showing that explicitation and implicitation may also depend on the type of relation a discourse connective triggers. for instance, cognitively complex relations (e.g. relation of contrast) are not so often left implicit than cognitively simple ones (see @xcite . ## methodology we use the critt translation process database (critt tpr-db, @xcite , which has been collected over years and contains a substantial amount of translation process data from numerous translation sessions. the collected data contains features allowing an in-depth assessment of human behavior in translation. we use a part of the data that includes english-german parallel texts. the experiment for this data was set up in such a way that each translator translated every text 1 in one of the three modes: translating from scratch, post-editing and performing monolingual post-editing. texts were permuted between successive translators, with the intention that for each set of 6 translators, every text would be translated, post-edited and edited 6 times. each of the 6 source texts is between 110 and 161 words in length and designed in such a way that it fits on one translog screen (see more details in @xcite . 1 with 32 translators and 6 english source texts in total. we selected a number of features reflecting translation behaviour, see ## summary and discussion we attempted to analyse explicitation and implicitaion phenomena of discourse connectives in english-german translations using the parallel data from the critt tpr-db. our results show that while implicitation requires low cognitive effort, it is not necessarily so for an equivalent translation. this may depend on the connective as indicated by the differences in pauses observed. this may also be dependent on the strength of its signal and the type of relation this connective conveys. explicitation generally causes a higher effort in the analysed cases, which are however quite few. in the future, we would like to analyse more instances of explicitation and implicitation for more connectives and include data originating from different genres, as there could be variation in processing discourse connectives across different contexts. moreover, we also intend to analyse differences in the cognitive processing of connectives depending on the processes of translation -if a translation was produced from scratch or if it was post-edited from a machine-translated output. this will provide some insights on how human translators are impacted by discourse-related issues in machinetranslated texts. moreover, translation process data provides explanations about problems human translators face. these may correlate with the difficulties in machine translation. a better understanding of problems in human translation may also help to improve machine translation.