Dynamic pause assessment of keystroke logged data for the detection of complexity in translation and monolingual text production

Pause analysis of key-stroke logged translations is a hallmark of process based translation studies. However, an exact definition of what a cognitively effortful pause during the translation process is has not been found yet (Saldanha and O’Brien, 2013). This paper investigates the design of a key-stroke and participantdependent identification system of cognitive effort to track complexity in translation with keystroke logging (cf. also (Dragsted, 2005) (Couto-Vale, in preparation)). It is an elastic measure that takes into account idiosyncratic pause duration of translators as well as further confounds such as bi-gram frequency, letter frequency and some motor tasks involved in writing. The method is compared to a common static threshold of 1,000 ms in an analysis of cognitive effort during the translation of grammatical functions from English to German. Additionally, the results are combined with an eye-tracking analysis for further validation. The findings show, that at least for smaller data sets a dynamic pause assessment may lead to more accurate results than a generic static pause threshold of similar duration.