Where and for how long do translators look at the screen while translating?

Eye movements were tracked of students, with and without touch-typing skills, while they translated three short texts of different levels of complexity under three different time constraints. The aim was to chart the distribution of visual attention between source and target texts, and to study how visual attention was affected by text complexity and time pressure. Participants with touch-typing skills were found to attend more to on-screen text than those without. Further it was shown that time pressure affected fixation duration on the source text, while text complexity affected the number of fixations on the source text. Also, touch typists made more direct, on-screen transitions from the source text to the target text and back than non-touch typists. Overall, average fixation duration was consistently longer in the target text area than in the source text area.