Analyzing the influence of reading purpose and translation experience on summary and translation tasks

an exploratory-experimental study

Abstract

This paper analyzes the influence of reading purpose and translation experience on the interface of reading and translation processes. Since this interface has not been fully explored, we propose this exploratory-experimental study in order to analyze the influence of reading purpose and translation experience on summary production tasks and translation tasks in the English-Portuguese language pair. Although this study’s participants’ sample was small and results significance could not be confirmed with statistical tests, results found seem to corroborate the hypothesis that target texts translated by professional translators were better evaluated than target texts produced by undergraduates. However, texts summarized by undergraduate students were better evaluated than those summarized by professional translators, which does not confirm another study hypothesis. Results also seem to confirm the hypotheses that professional translators carry out summary production and translation tasks faster than English Language undergraduates. Therefore, in addition to translation experience and reading purpose influencing the quality of summarized and translated texts, as well as the time for task performance, repeated practice of summary production may influence the quality of the summaries produced.