A Behavioral Protocol for Assessing Cognitive Effort and Strategic Revision in English-Chinese Translation and Sight...

This article presents a multimodal behavioral protocol for examining observable correlates of cognitive effort and strategic revision during English-Chinese written translation and sight interpreting. Keystroke logs and screen recordings are synchronized for written translation, whereas audio recordings and verbatim transcripts are used for sight interpreting. Revision and self-repair episodes are coded by type and by functional outcome (effective, neutral, or detrimental) independently of holistic output-quality ratings. In a demonstration with 62 participants assigned to novice and trained groups, both groups completed the two task conditions in counterbalanced order. Trained participants had higher mean output-quality scores in written translation (20.1 ± 2.1 vs. 16.8 ± 2.3) and sight interpreting (18.9 ± 2.4 vs. 15.4 ± 2.6), and a larger proportion of effective revisions or self-repairs. Because pauses, deletions, onset latency, and revision density are indirect and task-sensitive, they are interpreted as behavioral correlates that require triangulation rather than as direct measures of a unitary construct. The protocol is intended for controlled expository texts and can be adapted to other language pairs after recalibrating input-method handling, pause thresholds, text comparability, and scoring procedures.