Measuring the Cognitive Effort of Literal Translation Processes

Abstract

It has been claimed that human translators rely on some sort of literal translation equivalences to produce translations and to check their validity. More effort would be required if translations are less literal. However, to our knowledge, there is no established metric to measure and quantify this claim. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by introducing a metric for measuring literality of translations and assesses the effort that is observed when translators produce translations which deviate from the introduced literality definition.