Productivity and Lexical Pragmatic Features in a Contemporary CAT Environment: An Exploratory Study in English to Japanese

As the translation profession has become more technologized, translators increasingly work within an interface that combines translation from scratch, translation memory suggestions, machine translation post-editing, and terminological resources. This study analyses user activity data from one such interface, and measures temporal effort for English to Japanese translation at the segment level. Using previous studies of translation within the framework of relevance theory as a starting point, various features and edits were identified and annotated within the texts, in order to find whether there was a relationship between their prevalence and translation effort. Although this study is exploratory in nature, there was an expectation based on previous studies that procedurally encoded utterances would be associated with greater translation effort. This expectation was complicated by the choice of a language pair in which there has been little research applying relevance theory to translation, and by contemporary research that has made the distinction between procedural and conceptual encoding appear more fluid than previously believed. Our findings are that some features that lean more towards procedural encoding (such as prevalence of pronouns and manual addition of postpositions) are associated with increased temporal effort, although the small sample size makes it impossible to generalise. Segments translated with the aid of translation memory showed the least average temporal effort, and segments translated using machine translation appeared to require more effort than translation from scratch

Perceptual resemblance and the communication of emotion in digital contexts: a case of emoji and reaction GIFs

Online communication has created new ways to express emotions, including emoji and reaction GIFs. Emoji are often discussed as signs for meaning-making, adding emotional tone to communication. Reaction GIFs express emotions and attitudes in a playful manner. This study shows that through the lens of cognitive pragmatics, these phenomena are not distinct. Both are cases of non-verbal communication pointing to the communicator’s emotional state. Drawing on relevance-theoretic notions of the showing-meaning continuum and perceptual resemblance, along with relevance-theoretic analyses of metaphor and irony, I argue that emoji and reaction GIFs provide clues to ostension and communicate emotions by virtue of perceptual resemblance between what they represent and the communicator’s emotional state. I will also argue that both emoji and GIFs can involve echoic use of language, enabling the communicator to convey their attitude

Onomatopoeia - Showing-word or saying-word? Relevance theory, lexis, and the communication of impressions

Onomatopoeia is typically described as involving the use of words which imitate sounds. The study of onomatopoeia is often approached through theories of sound symbolism. However, while such approaches provide rich descriptions of onomatopoeia, they have generally paid little attention to the role of onomatopoeia in communication. In this study, we focus on onomatopoeia as a communicative phenomenon, considering what the use of onomatopoeia communicates, and how it is communicated. Our main claim is that onomatopoeia falls on the showing--saying continuum (Wharton, 2009), and involves elements of both showing and saying, contributing to relevance by providing direct evidence for some of the meaning it communicates. We argue that onomatopoeia involves the exploitation of resemblances, and that the non-arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning is a result of the communicator’s attempts to recreate his sensory experience using sounds which provide a faithful enough representation of his experience. What is communicated by the use of onomatopoeia is both vague and context-dependent: it amounts to what relevance theorists call an impression rather than a determinate meaning. Our analysis also extends to multimodal and cross-modal communicative behaviours and should therefore pave the way for further investigation of the interface between verbal and non-verbal communication

Crazy Japanese subtitle? Shedding light on the impact of impact captions

This paper addresses intralingual captions called “impact captions” (Park 2009) that have become an integral part of entertainment TV programmes in parts of Asia. These captions are different from the mainstream intralingual captions designed for accessibility for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. Aimed at enhancing the entertainment value of a programme for hearing viewers, impact captions are designed to draw the viewer’s attention to particular elements according to the TV producer’s perspective. Despite the prevalent and increasing use of such captions, however, they are created without formal guidelines at the discretion of TV producers. Focusing on these novel captions which fall outside the norms of TV captions elsewhere, this paper discusses their impact on viewers while exploring methodological issues in eye-tracking research. The initial experiment results show few fixations in the caption area; despite the participants declaring that they read the captions, viewers fixate far more on the middle region of the screen where faces are shown. The paper discusses the limitations and advantages of reception studies based on eye-tracking while contributing towards further refinement of empirically-oriented reception studies in audiovisual translation (AVT) research

The ‘hookability’ of multimodal impact captions A mixed-methods exploratory study

The use of captions has grown in recent years in both traditional and new media, particularly in terms of the diversity of style, content, and function. Impact captions have emerged as a popular form of captions for hearing viewers and contain rich multimodal information which is employed to capture viewer attention and enhance engagement, particularly in situations where there is competition for viewer attention. Drawing upon relevance theory, we argue how impact captions could effectively attract and hold visual attention owing to their balance between processing effort and contextual effects. This exploratory study employs a dual-task paradigm and uses authentic materials and viewing situations to further examine the ability of multimodal impact captions to attract and retain overt visual attention amongst a small sample of TV viewers. Our results provide novel insight into the apparent highly individualised efficacy of impact captions, where we identify several variables of interest in participants’ viewing behaviours. We conclude with a discussion of the study’s contributions, limitations, and an outline for future work

Onomatopoeia: a relevance-based eye-tracking study of digital manga

This study is concerned with the reception of onomatopoeia in the English translation of digital manga. In manga, onomatopoeia is often presented as part of the aesthetics, being both verbal (meaning) and non-verbal (showing) simultaneously. Drawing on the relevance-theoretic notion of a showing-saying continuum (Sperber and Wilson 1995), this study aims to identify factors that affect reading behaviour including the translation strategies and the degree of the showing/meaning ness. We conducted an eye-tracking study to gain empirically supported insight into readers’ interaction with onomatopoeia in manga. Findings of this study show that full-textual substitution, which is the hybrid of showing-meaning, attracts most interest and is the area that receives most attention when compared with annotation or the Japanese original. This in turn indicates that the degree of showing-ness of onomatopoeia influences the way readers interact with onomatopoeia in manga. The conclusion is that separating the showing and meaning elements of onomatopoeia in manga could result in a loss of engagement potential with readers, and full-textual substitution would be the recommended translation strategy for the best level of attention