Spotlight on the reader: methodological challenges in combining translation process, product, and translation reception

Abstract This contribution addresses methodological challenges in integrating translation process, product, and reception data, and explores intricate relationships between translator’s cognitive effort, translation quality, and the readers’ cognitive effort. The interplay is examined with an eyetracking experiment in which participants read professional L2→L1 translations (whole texts) of varying quality (high vs. low). The analysis focuses on meaning integration and re-processing during L1 reading, operationalised through three eyetracking measures: dwell time, number of runs, and re-reading dwell time. The texts read are either high-quality translations (an end-product of a translator with many years of professional experience) or low-quality translations (delivered by a less experienced professional translator). Each L2→L1 translation consists of eight sentences. Each sentence in the text thus has a record of each reader’s cognitive effort (eyetracking measures), and a record of translator’s cognitive effort operationalised as the time taken by the translator to deliver a translation of a target sentence. Results reveal a significant interaction effect: readers exert more cognitive effort when reading low-quality translations, particularly when the translator’s effort is lower, whereas high-quality translations elicit increased reader’s effort when the translator’s effort is higher. Moderated mediation analyses further show that readers’ proficiency in the source text language (L2) mediates the relationship between the number of years they use their L2 and cognitive effort invested in reading L1 translations, but only in the case of low-quality translations. These findings underscore the complex dynamics between translation production and reception, highlighting the role of individual differences in shaping cognitive processing. The study contributes to the growing body of research in Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies by bridging process- and reception-oriented approaches, and by offering insights into how translator’s effort and decisions impact reading processes.