The Linguist

16 The Linguist Vol/60 No/5 2021 thelinguist.uberflip.com FEATURES Callum Walker's eye-tracking research shows how the words translators choose affect the reading experience For writers and translators alike, the specific lexical and syntactic choices that we make have a considerable impact on the ways in which readers interact with a text. So what can we learn from reading research, and how does this relate to the work of translators, especially in highly stylised contexts such as literature? I gained useful insights by comparing the use of marked style in Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le métro (1959) and in its acclaimed English translation, Zazie in the Metro, by Barbara Wright (1960). Queneau experiments with language, juxtaposing 'standard' French with what he referred to as néo-français – a language variety that uses a unique quasi-phonetic spelling and unorthodox grammar to give the impression of a highly colloquial, spoken form. Critical interpretations of Zazie are many and various, but how the distinctive style is actually experienced by readers – including readers of the translation – has been neglected. Reading experiments A vast amount of research has been carried out in the field of cognitive psychology over the last 50 years to investigate how the linguistic characteristics of a text affect our reading experience. Much of this work has used eye-tracking experiments to record precisely where the eyes are looking, and for how long, offering an insight into the reader's cognitive effort at specific points. In 1980, the eye-mind hypothesis was proposed, arguing that readers process the word that the eyes are fixated on and that the duration of the fixation on that word is directly proportionate to the amount of cognitive effort involved in its processing. Such models mean we can be fairly confident of the cognitive effects that individual words have on readers. While the eye-mind hypothesis has since been refined, the connection between visual attention and cognitive effort holds true, which is why eye- tracking has become widespread in fields ranging from driving to software usability and, in the last 15 years, translation process and audiovisual translation research. High-frequency words (i.e. those that appear regularly in the language) tend to elicit short fixation times and lower cognitive effort, while low-frequency words result in longer fixations and higher cognitive effort. The same principles apply to predictability: if the next word in a sentence is easy to predict from the preceding context, the fixation duration will be low (lower cognitive effort), while unexpected words will yield higher cognitive effort. Research has revealed the 'cognitive cost' of complex morphological compounds (in languages such as Finnish and German), long words, grammatical/syntactic violations, misspellings and purposely manipulated orthography. In short, any form of stylistically foregrounded language (i.e. words or phrases made to appear more prominent in order to achieve a particular effect) will result in higher levels of cognitive effort. These findings provide a crucial link between the stylistic features of a text and how the text is experienced by readers. Translation reception To explore these models of reading in a translation context, I recorded how native French readers experienced passages from Zazie in the original French, how native English readers experienced the English translation, and how a second set of native English readers experienced a translation that was rendered 'stylistically neutral'. Specific words and phrases of interest were identified across the three versions and compared in terms of their cognitive impact on readers. Most interesting were Queneau's so-called 'concertina-words', in which he manipulates the spelling and squashes words together to reflect rapidly spoken French. These words seize the reader's attention and are a prominent feature of Zazie. I looked at 153 examples, including cexé (ce que c'est; whatitiz; 'what is it?'), essméfie (elle se méfie; shezon her guard; 'she's wary'), and kouavouar (quoi à voir; tweetosee; 'what are we to see'). These creations rely on an almost phonetic code, forcing readers to 'speak' the expression in order to understand the meaning. Early in the novel, Zazie's uncle Gabriel exchanges a few tense words with a man, Reading deeply SKEUTADITTALEUR: A heat map showing areas of higher (red) and lower (green) visual attention while reading Zazie dans le métro

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