Comic Books in Translation: Process and Quality in Metaphor Translation

The goal of the project is to explore how people translate metaphors when tackling the creative parts of a text and to measure the quality of metaphors. To achieve this goal, this project investigates three issues. First, the process of translating metaphors in comic books of two different groups is described and compared. One group is composed of translators who translated metaphors in comic books manually without the help of machine translation while the other group is composed of post-editors who edited machine-translated metaphors, i.e. an output of a machine translation engine, Google Translate. Second, the effort that translators and post-editors make cognitively is measured and compared through measuring pauses. Although it is difficult to measure cognitive effort made by humans directly, pauses that occur during the process of translation can be good indirect means of measuring cognitive effort. Third, to look at the influence of machine translation on the translation product in various aspects, the quality of the final product from translators and post-editors is measured by reviewers. The process of translating metaphors is recorded by the participants themselves, using screen-recording software and key-stroke logging software. Also, for a qualitative analysis of the data, interviews are carried out after the translation task. The translation is carried out from Korean into English. Thus, this project examines the extent to which machine translation may facilitate or hinder the production of a text that requires taking visual and cultural context into account. This project builds on a tradition of examining the translation process and translators’ cognitive effort; at the same time, it innovates because the project deals with machine translation post-editing when translating a text which requires translators' and post-editors' creativity. Moreover, this project is expected to contribute to studies on comics in the field of Translation Studies