Measuring Cognitive Translation Effort with Activity Units

Despite the increased quality of Machine Translation output, human interaction will remain a crucial activity to guarantee the quality of the final translation products. Human-computer interaction in translation will likely be the more successful the more we understand the properties and complementarities of both partners. This paper traces cognitive approaches in machine translation back to the mid-1980s and argues that we now have the technologies available that will allow us to eventually arrive at an in-depth understanding of the human translation processes. It illustrates some of the research methods in empirical translation process research and suggests ngrams of Activity Units for measuring the translation process.