How do interpreting students and untrained bilinguals perform sight translation?
What is it about?
Interpreting students and untrained bilinguals with comparable language proficiency were invited to perform three tasks: (1) silent reading (for comprehension); (2) reading aloud (for comprehension); (3) Sight translation. How the participants read the texts and how sight translation is done were investigated. We found that interpreting students chose not to read through the text but rather began sight-translating it almost immediately, while many more untrained bilinguals tended to engage in thorough normal reading first. However, the students still managed to finish the sight translation task much faster with better quality, both reaching statistical significance. The secret to the students' success lies in language flexibility. From the very beginning, they started producing output whenever they found a meaning unit along the way, thereby chunking the text at hand into really short segments, and were successful in tackling each segment one by one rapidly.
Why is it important?
One of the first studies to explore the cognitive process of sight translation with local eye movement indices for reading.