The processing of German modal particles in post-editing tasks

Abstract

German Modal Particles (MPs) are linguistic elements that pose severe difficulties for the translation and post-editing processes. One of the major reasons for such hindrance is the context-dependence function of the MP. This work is an effort to collect relevant information about the translation and decision-making processes in the German/Portuguese language pair. It presents the results of an experimental study on post-editing the MPs doch and wohl into Brazilian Portuguese. In order to empirically investigate the cognitive effort required to post-edit machine translated modal particles, three research instruments were used, namely: the software Translog-II; the eye tracker Tobii T60; a prospective questionnaire (free and guided). In the experiment, twenty Brazilian participants were asked to post-edit five Portuguese machine translation outputs with MP's doch and wohl. The results here presented tend to confirm the hypothesis by GUTT (1998) and the study on processing analysis performed by ALVES (2007), which show that the relation between effort and effect does not obey a linear relation among themselves. Therefore, the analysis of how modal particles are processed in post-editing tasks tends to show that different cognitive environments imply distinct allocation of the minimum cognitive effort needed to achieve a relevant contextual effect.

Keywords:
German modal particles; post-editing; procedural approach in translation; cognitive effort; contextual effects