Relating Production Units and Alignment Units in Translation Activity Data

Abstract

Dept. of International Languages Studies & Computational Linguistics,Copenhagen Business School, 2000-Frederiksberg, DenmarkAbstract. The definition and characterisation of Translation Units(TUs) in human translation is controversial and has been described inmany different ways. This paper looks at TUs from a translation processperspective: we investigate the sequences of keystrokes which have beentyped during translation production and re-define TUs in terms of textproduction units (PUs). We correlate those units with translation equiv-alences in the translation product, so-called alignment units (AUs) andcompare the translation performance of student and professional trans-lators on a small translation task of 160 words from English into Danish.In contrast to what has frequently been assumed, our data reveals thatTUs are rather coarse, as compared to the notion of ‘translation atoms’,comprising several AUs, and they are particularly coarse for professionaltranslators.