Sight Translation Text Evaluation: an Investigation of the Effect of Text Layout and Typographic Design for Didactic Progression

Abstract

Sight Translation could probably be labelled as the “Cinderella” of interpretation modes. While the girl in the fairytale works her hands off, her needs are ignored by those who depend on her. In analogy, sight translation is an indispensable training tool to prepare students for the professional workspace, but yet it is still neglected to a great extent by academic research. As sight translation is increasingly taught and examined separately, automatically the question for a didactic course progression in terms of suitable teaching materials arises. This study set out to shed some light on this question by investigating the impact of different typographic designs and text layouts on the difficulty of a sight translation task for trainee interpreters. Hereby the research aimed for a better understanding of which visual source text features might have to be considered to develop a didactic material progression. In other words, how should appropriate teaching materials for beginners or advanced students look like? Taking Nord’s model for assessing the difficulty of a translation task as a starting point, we tried to apply a similar model to the sight translation context by including the visual appearance of the source text into this calculation. The participants of this research were four interpreter students of the Centre for Translation and Interpretation at the University of Nairobi who functioned as subjects as well as respondents. We assessed the trainees’ perceptions of the impact of various visual and non-visual source text features on the difficulty of sight translation through questionnaires. Moreover, every subject performed six sight translations whereby the source language was Kiswahili and the target language was English. By providing these materials in different layouts and typographic designs, we investigated how these parameters affected the perceived difficulty of the sight translation tasks and the actual renditions. The findings of this study corroborated that text layout and typographic design should be considered for a didactic progression of sight translation texts. This is because certain layouts and typographic features can be perceived as hindering or supportive of the sight translation task.