O esforço de processamento das partículas modais doch e wohl em tarefas de pós-edição: uma investigação processual no par linguistico alemão/português.

Abstract

German Modal Particles (MPs) are linguistic elements that pose severe difficulties for the translation and post-editing processes in the German/Portuguese language pair. A couple of the major reasons for such hindrance are: i) the function of the MPs is context-dependent; ii) there are no direct counterparts for MPs in Portuguese. This thesis is an effort to collect relevant information about the translation and decision-making processes in the German/Portuguese language pair. It presents the results of two experimental studies on post-editing the German Modal Particles doch and wohl into Brazilian Portuguese. In order to empirically investigate the cognitive effort required to post-edit machine translated modal particles, three research instruments were used, namely: the software Translog-II to log cognitive segmentation patterns; the eye tracker Tobii T60 to obtain data on fixation duration and fixation count in selected areas of interest containing MP´s doch and wohl; and a prospective questionnaire to profile the participants retrospective verbal protocols (free and guided). In the first experiment, twenty Brazilian participants were asked to post-edit five Portuguese machine translation outputs with MP´s doch and wohl. All participants were native Portuguese speakers and were proficient in German. In the second experiment, sixteen participants (equally divided between Brazilian and German natives) post-edited three machine translation outputs containing the MP wohl in three different positions of the same sentence. This group of participants were native speakers of their mother tongues and proficient in the respective foreign language. Data analysis supports only partially the hypothesis that processing the MPs requires a higher cognitive effort than the amount of effort required to process the remaining text. Furthermore, fixation data indicates that post-editing machine translation input for the areas of interest containing the MP wohl demands a higher processing effort from Brazilian than German individuals. This finding may lie on the different metarepresentation, or double displacement of cognitive environments achieved by the two groups. Nevertheless, the results here presented tend to confirm the hypothesis by Gutt (1998) and the study on processing analysis performed by Alves (2007) which show that the relation between effort and effect does not obey a linear relation among themselves. Therefore, the analysis of how modal particles are processed in post-editing tasks tends to show that different cognitive environments imply distinct allocation of the minimum cognitive effort needed to achieve a relevant contextual effect. Finally, the eye fixation data, the analysis of the translation units and the comments offered in the 11 retrospective verbal protocols indicate that if properly processed, the modal particles can offer communicative cues that provide contextual inferences.