Eye-tracking in Translation and Interpreting Studies: The growing popularity and methodological problems

The emerging eye-tracking technique has opened a window of opportunities not only in medical research but also in Translation and Interpreting Studies. In recent years this research method has been used to trace the processes of reading, translation and interpreting. Eye-tracking has recently become a popular technique to examine cognitive effort involved in written translation, audiovisual translation and conference interpreting. Thanks to the use of an eye-tracker one is able to investigate the whole process and not limit oneself to analysing the quality of the output. To be more precise, by means of eye-tracking experimenters may investigate moment-by-moment changes in the cognitive effort necessary to perform a given translation/interpreting task. Useful as the eye-tracking technique may be, researchers must often face methodological and apparatus-related challenges. The present paper is intended to discuss the eye-tracking methodology and then to address the potential problems of applying this method to investigate the processes of translation and interpreting. Among the notions to be discussed are: the types of eye-trackers and their usability, accuracy vs. ecological validity, accommodation (O'Brien 2010), sampling, the use of inferential statistics for small experimental groups as well as ethics. I will also refer to my own research on the notion of language-pair specificity in sight translation (Korpal 2012) as well as a collaborative work on numerical data processing in simultaneous interpreting (Korpal and Stachowiak, manuscript in preparation)