ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates whether and how an increase in perceived translation difficulty would affect student translators’ allocation of cognitive resources between translating and consultation, using eye-tracking and screen-recording data. To this aim, we conducted an experiment in which 38 MA translation students were recruited to translate two 100-word texts from English (L2) into Chinese (L1), with their translating and consultation processes being recorded by an eye-tracker. Our observation of the data reveals three major findings: 1) when student translators perceive an increase in translation difficulty, they allocate more time to consultation, which accounts for a larger proportion of the entire translation process; 2) when translating a difficult text, they consult more types of online resources to fulfil the increased information need; and 3) they tend to conduct more transitions between translating and consultation.
