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WALKER, CALLUM. AN EYE-TRACKING STUDY OF EQUIVALENT

EFFECT IN TRANSLATION: THE READER EXPERIENCE OF LITERARY

STYLE. LONDON, PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2021, 414 PP., ISBN

978-3-030-55769-0

There has long been a hypothesis of equivalence in Translation

Studies (TS) (Nida, 1964; Newmark, 1988; among many others), meaning

an equivalent effect is experienced by the original readers of a given source

text (ST) and the readers of its corresponding target text (TT). Notably,

however, not a single empirical study has been carried out to prove this

hypothesis or concept until Callum Walker published his book entitled An

Eye-Tracking Study of Equivalent Effect in Translation: The Reader

Experience of Literary Style (2021). He took a bold step using an eye-tracker

to gauge the equivalent effect (if any) between ST readers reading the

marked stylistic texts from extracts of a French ST, and an English TT as

well as a neutral TTx meaning there is not marked language variety and it

only serves as a quasi-control text.

Driven by the empirical turn (Snell-Hornby, 2006), TS has gradually

shifted its traditional product-oriented approach to a process-oriented one,

thanks to the advancement of technologies, such as eye-tracking,

electroencephalogram, etc. Against this backdrop, the book has made its

first foray into a wide range of disciplines including cognitive translation

studies (CTS), translation process research (TPR), reception studies,

cognitive psychology, as well as stylistics in literary translation and criticism.

While most CTS and TPR focus on the process of translation, this book does

not focus on the process of how literary texts are translated, «but on the

cognitive effects of the product of translation in conjunction with the effects

of the original text» (p. 14). Adopting a mixed-methods approach, this book

attempts «to supplement the traditional subjective analyses of translation

equivalence with more objective, empirical means of analysis» (p. 8).

Chapter 1 commences with some thought-provoking questions for

readers about whether styles in literary translation should be dropped, and

how to bring a similar reading experience to readers of both original and

translated literature containing a body of stylistic foregrounding devices (e.g.,

alliteration, rhyme, inversion, ellipsis, metaphor, irony) used to draw the

attention of readers. These questions introduce the key concepts and main

discussion points of this book and provide a springboard for the research

objectives to be addressed in later chapters.

Chapter 2 identifies some gaps in TS literature in TPR and reception

research strands, which have already been widely applied in audiovisual

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translation (AVT) in particular. This chapter then presents a mixed-methods

design with both quantitative and qualitative approaches used for the study

of stylistic devices, literary translation as well as their effects of different

translation versions on the ST and TT readers. An important goal at the core

of the research design is to test the hypothesis of equivalence with a focus

on the case study, the selected literary work Zazie dans le métro (1959)

written by Raymond Queneau and its English translation Zazie in the Metro

(1960) by Barbara Wright.

In Chapter 3, the importance of the interplay between Raymond

Queneau’s authorial intent and reader response is thoroughly discussed. Put

simply, «authors could explore and experiment with their language to predict,

fairly reliably, how readers might respond to the effects engendered by their

writing» (p. 78), whereas «a reader’s response to a text will be constrained

by their knowledge and exposure (or lack thereof) to the linguistic forms

employed» (p. 81). The core issues to be addressed in the case study are

whether the author’s intentional use of stylistic devices in the novel can

result in «an impression of “strikingness” or “prominence” for the reader» (p.

97), and more importantly, whether their translation can achieve similar

cognitive effects and reading experiences for TT readers as for ST readers.

Drawing upon and integrating Eco’s (1989) notion of openness and

closedness into the stylistic features, Walker builds a new model for stylistic

openness and closedness. For instance, a more stylistically opened text is

likely to result in higher cognitive efforts during readers’ reading process «as

the stylistic features exhibit greater deviance from the norm» (p. 105). This

chapter builds a theoretical understanding and contextualisation on style and

stylistics in literature experience, paving way for the empirical testing of

equivalence in reader responses to literary translation.

Chapter 4 provides a brief history of eye-tracking research and

highlights how eye-tracking is linked to readers’ cognition with regard to the

study of literature. As clarified in this chapter, the main purpose of using eye-

tracking is «to measure the extent or scale of a response» (p. 111) of

readers reflected as eye-movement parameters, such as fixation (a period

when eyes stare at a point) and saccade (a rapid movement of eyes that

shifts between fixations), during the natural reading process. It is also widely

accepted that there is a strong connection between visual attention and

cognitive effort, particularly in a TS context – in fact, «longer visual attention

is indicative of higher levels of cognitive effort, while shorter visual attention

is indicative of lower levels of cognitive effort» (p. 129). In the context of

reading, for instance, low-frequency and long words can trigger longer

fixation durations and therefore increase readers’ cognitive efforts. In light of

this eye-tracking technology, «existing research on the empirical

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psychological dimensions of foregrounding [can be conducted to]

understand the true influence of different stylistic devices on the reading

experience» (p. 151).

Chapter 5 moves its discussion on stylistic devices in monolingual

settings to those in interlingual translation. It sets out to discuss the degree

of faithfulness between an original and its translation, not from a lexical,

grammatical or pragmatic perspective; rather, a reader-oriented one.

Drawing upon relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986), this research

measures whether there are similar or equivalent effects experienced by

both source and target readers. In other words, «if the communicative clues

to the author’s intended poetic effects and cognitive state can be effectively

rendered in translation, the affective state experienced by the reader of the

TT can be described as cognitively equivalent» (p. 198). The case in point of

this research is to investigate the stylistic language varieties identified from

not only the so-called «poignant passage» (p. 154) of the novel, but also the

pertinent instances of concertina-words that may attract the readers’

attention and raise the cognitive efforts required to read both original and

translated versions.

Chapter 6 reveals the mixed-methods design principles, data handling

and statistical analysis method for the quasi-experiment study. Having

classified the hypotheses into three models, namely, «H

0: ST≈TT, H1: ST>TT,

and H

2: ST<TT» (p. 218), in this research the author firstly carried out two

pilot studies to adjust the given text with appropriate readability in a

preliminary trial which was then fed into a pilot experiment for the

hypotheses testing. Following the pilot studies, the author maps out the

elements involved in his quasi-experiment, including the stylistic areas of

interest (AOIs) as independent variables, the eye-movement data as

dependent variables, participant sampling (45 people), length of textual

stimuli, equipment (Tobii TX300), a more ecologically valid research

environment with unobtrusive setup, the double-line-spaced display for the

comfort of participants, and, finally, the detailed experiment protocol for

participants to follow. The eye-movement quantitative data was collected

from a total of 32 AOIs (24 from a passage and 8 concertina-words such as

orthographic manipulation, misspelling, compounding, etc.) while the

qualitative data was collected from a 5-point Likert scale about participants’

subjective judgement on cognitive effects. Subsequently, the eye-tracking

data were scaled accordingly by transformation for comparison with the

qualitative data. The results of all the data analyses are covered in the

following chapter.

Chapter 7 showcases the results of the eye-tracking experiment. Not

only are the demographic information and the results of post-experiment

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questions to 45 participants unveiled, but the experiment is objectively

evaluated about the technical constraints encountered, font and size of the

typeface on the reading experience, as well as some hindsight about

calibration and participant conditions. Results show that over half of the

AOIs (56%) were correctly predicted, although there was a disparity in

accuracy rate between the AOIs from the extracted passage (46%) and the

individual stylistic words (88%). This disparity is probably because «the level

of stylistic salience in the [...] passage was less pronounced than in the

concertina-words» (p. 344). Overall, the achieved cognitive equivalence

(47%) was slightly lower than the loss of cognitive equivalence (53%),

«given the challenges posed by the translation of language variation» (p.

350). Finally, the eye-tracking data broadly matched the quantified

qualitative data, vindicating the mixed-methods design and the potentiality of

eye-tracking technology employed in cognitive-equivalence measurement.

Chapter 8 further implies a positive correlation between higher mean

gaze duration (meaning higher cognitive efforts) and a wider spread in

cognitive effort in a specific AOI. Likewise, as stylistic salience is relative to

cognitive efforts, a higher level of stylistic salience can also yield a wider

spread of cognitive efforts. Recognising eye-tracking as a powerful and

intriguing technology in the natural reading process or other relevant

disciplines, this chapter then concludes by sharing the opportunities for

future empirical research.

To sum up, this book sets an outstanding example for mixed-methods

research using eye-tracking to test equivalence in the reception of literary

translation. Methodologically, it is a seminal work that borrows eye-tracking

technology to measure the cognitive effects between ST and TT readers,

thus providing strong empirical evidence or proof for the concept or

hypothesis of equivalence that has long been assumed by translation

scholars. However, there are some limitations identified in and insights

gained from the study. First, the experiment results are hard to generalise

due to the limited sample size – 45 participants with 14 to 17 in each group.

A larger sample size (e.g., 30 people per group) is thus called for to reinforce

both the validity and reliability of the experiment and help to generalise

findings for a larger population. Second are minor technical issues such as

unexpected computer crashes having occurred occasionally during the page

turn, which could harm the reading process and experience of participants

and cause missing data. As confessed by the author, «a larger amount of

data would have been obtained were it not for these technical constraints»

(p. 300). Last but not least, the methodological choice of not removing

outliers concerning small sample sizes (hence relatively small datasets)

could affect the reliability of the results, given that analysis of variance, or

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ANOVA is sensitive to outliers. Though it is a tough decision, removing

outliers «may allow for more conclusive relationships to come to light

between the groups and for more finely tuned methods of comparison» (p.

381). Notwithstanding room for improvement, I strongly recommend this

book to scholars in TS or relevant areas as it successfully sheds new light

on the empirical approach to literary translation and reception studies. It is a

timely and state-of-the-art reference for future empirical TS studies or even

replication studies, and these could investigate different language pairs (e.g.,

Chinese-English), more linguistic features (e.g., humour or taboo language),

different forms of materials (e.g., comic books or manga), and/or a range of

participants (e.g., children and adults), to name but a few avenues of further

such research.

EFERENCES

Eco, U. (1989). The Open Work. (A. Cancogni, Trans.). Cambridge: Harvard

University Press.

Newmark, P. (1988). Pragmatic translation and literalism. TTR: traduction,

terminologie, rédaction, 1(2), 133-145. Doi: 10.7202/037027ar

Nida, E. (1964). Toward a Science of Translating with Special Reference to

Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating. Leiden: Brill.

Snell-Hornby, M. (2006). The Turns of Translation Studies. Amsterdam:

John Benjamins. Doi: 10.1075/btl.66

Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and Cognition.

Oxford: Blackwell.

IHANG JIANG]