Patterns of shallow text production in translation

The depth and timing of source text understanding during translation production is controversial in translation process research. Two theories seem to compete: defenders of the deep/alternating school assume that translators proceed in cycles of comprehension-transferproduction, while other translation scholars suggest that translations may be produced in a fashion of shallow and parallel comprehension and production. We assess these hypotheses by comparing text production activities in a copying task and in a translation task. Text copying constitutes a kind of baseline for text production in general as we can assume that any other form of text production (including translation) requires more time and effort than merely text reproduction. Surprisingly, however, we observe similar patterns of keystroke behaviour in copying and