Author: Anne-Kathrin Gros

From 22 to 23 August, Silke Gutermuth, Anke Tardel and Anne-Kathrin Gros from the Tra&Co Team attended the Scandinavian Workshop on Applied Eye Tracking (SWAET), an interdisciplinary meeting place for students, researchers and manufacturers of eye tracking devices.

Eye trackers are not only used in linguistics. Many other scientific fields work with this methodology, including visual perception studies, marketing, usability studies or simulator training.

Keynotespeakers were Professor Reinhold Kliegl from the University of Potsdam who talked about fixation locations and fixation durations during reading and Dr. Monica Castelhano from Queen's University Ontario on natural scene perception and visual search.

Our colleague Anke Tardel presented a study in cooperation with ZDF digital on eye movements and split attention during the intralingual subtitling process.

During the conference we were able to observe the various applications of eye tracking in other research fields. We presented our own research and gathered ideas and impulses for future eye tracking studies at the FTSK.

Beim 1. Digitalforum Rheinland-Pfalz am 8. August 2018 wurden die Ergebnisse und Maßnahmen der „Strategie für das digitale Leben“ mit Praxisbeispielen und interessanten Vorträgen vorgestellt.

Silvia Hansen-Schirra und Silke Gutermuth vom Tra&Co Team stellten dort das Kooperationsprojekt „Mehr Bürgernähe durch verständliche Sprache“ mit dem Ministerium für Soziales, Arbeit, Gesundheit und Demografie Rheinland-Pfalz (MSAGD) vor.

Gerade in Behördenkontexten ist der Zugang zu Information für alle Bevölkerungsgruppen ein wichtiges Instrument zur Interessenwahrnehmung und demokratischen Bürgerbeteiligung. Oft ist „Behördensprache“ jedoch für viele Menschen nur schwer zu verstehen.

Abhilfe könnte hier die Verwendung Einfacher und Leichter Sprache schaffen, Sprachvarietäten, die u.a. auf der mehr oder weniger ausgeprägten Verwendung von kurzen, bekannten Wörtern und kurzen, einfachen Sätzen sowie Vermeidung von Nominalisierung, Passivstrukturen, Abkürzungen und Fremdwörtern basieren.

Ob solche Texte wirklich leichter zu lesen und verständlicher sind, war Gegenstand einer empirischen Lesestudie im Rahmen eines Kooperationsprojektes. Zur Überprüfung der „Einfachheit“ der Texte wurde neben Verständlichkeitsratings und Inhaltsfragen u.a. Eye-Tracking eingesetzt.

Erste Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die weniger komplexen Sprachstrukturen generell, wenn auch in unterschiedlicher Ausprägung, zu kürzeren Lesezeiten und mehr Verständlichkeit bei allen Probandengruppen führten.

Ministerpräsidentin Malu Dreyer, Wirtschaftsminister Volker Wissing, Umweltministerin Ulrike Höfken und Staatssekretärin Heike Raab informierten sich über das Projekt.

We are delighted to announce the second conference in the ICTIC (International Congress on Translation, Interpreting and Cognition) series to be hosted by the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germersheim.

The aim of the second International Congress on Translation, Interpreting and Cognition is to combine interdisciplinary aspects with multi-method approaches. We would like to encourage you to submit abstracts on the following topics:

Translation/interpreting, cognition, and
- behaviour
- training
- language processing
- technology and digitization
- multimedia
- ergonomics and usability
- emotions, self-concept and psychological factors
- revision and post-editing

The research for presentation should be empirical – in terms of methodology, we welcome a broad spectrum as well as mixed approaches, e.g. keylogging, eyetracking, brain imaging techniques and others.

Submission deadline for your abstract is 01 February 2019

The following keynote-speakers have been confirmed:

• Michael Carl (Copenhagen Business School, University of Beijing)
• Adolfo García (INCyT)
• Sandra Halverson (Bergen University)
• Alexis Hervais-Adelman (University of Zurich)
• Kristian Hvelplund (University of Copenhagen)
• Lucia Specia (University of Sheffield

For further information click here

The project Modelling Parameters of Cognitive Efforts in Translation Production (Memento) organizes a four week boot-camp between 8th and 31st July 2018 in Macau on empirical TPR at the University of Macau. The boot-camp aims to investigate and develop new ways of assessing, analyzing and measuring translation process data and to explore possibilities to integrate translation product and process research in novel ways. It focuses on the conceptualization of translation processes with a view to investigate what metrics we need to describe the various translation sub-processes based on translation process data. The boot-camp is of interest for advanced students, PhD students, post-docs and senior researchers, covering different fields of expertise, including translation studies, psychology and psycho-linguists, as well as computer science students with an interest in machine learning, data analytics and artificial intelligence. TPR data will be collected and legacy data will be made available to implement and test novel approaches for measuring the translation process in different modes of translation, including written translation, post-editing, sight translation and interpreting.

For further information see the posting 'Memento' in Projects.

The Research group “Einfach komplex – Leichte Sprache” works on the project which aimes at investigating the psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic correlates of Leichte Sprache. By using an interdisciplinary and innovative approach and by applying methods such as eye-tracking (ET), electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a neurobiologically feasible model of Leichte Sprache is developed.The project examines the impact of complexity reduction on several linguistic levels, including those of syntax, morphology, lexicon and semantics.

The interdisciplinary research group offers four doctoral scholarships for outstanding graduates of linguistics, translation studies, life sciences or the like.
For more information on the project and the application process see https://leichtesprache.uni-mainz.de/.
The closing date for application is 30 April 2018.

Our new project in cooperation with ZDF digital combines neural machine translation and post-editing in the domain of TV subtitling in order to optimize the process of subtitling while maintaining the translations’ high quality.

For more information see the posting in Projects

Silvia Hansen-Schirra, Oliver Čulo & Sascha Hofmann (Eds.). (2017). Empirical modelling of translation and interpreting (Vol. 7). Language Science Press.

ISBN: 978-3-96110-025-5
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1089335

Many of our colleagues contributed to this volume of the series Translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing.
The book is now available (open access):
http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/132

Welcome to our new Tra&Co Blog!