視譯不同於其他口譯作業形式，是以閱讀接收訊息，因此視譯文本的特色和難度很可能便是造成視譯困難的主要來源。本研究探討視譯的困難，以易讀性公式判別兩篇英文文本的難易度，觀察參與者的視譯表現是否與易讀性公式判斷結果相符，在視譯後並對參與者進行回想訪談，收集視譯困難資料。實驗參與者為十位翻譯所口譯組學生，自變項為兩篇英文文本，依變項有視譯錯誤分析得分、視譯時間、視譯重起句子次數、譯文字數、視譯超過兩秒停頓次數、閱讀測驗表現、摘要撰寫表現。
本研究有以下發現：
1.易讀性公式判別為較難的文本，參與者翻譯時錯誤比例較高、譯文字數較多。其他五項在兩份文本上的表現則無統計上的顯著差異。
2.視譯過程中處理概念複雜的句子和長句時，似乎需要動用短期記憶氣力。
3.句長似乎可作為衡量視譯文本難易度的參考指標。
4.英文和中文句法差異愈大，視譯時似乎愈困難。
5.視譯時參與者普遍重視流暢度規範甚於其他規範。

Sight translation differs from other modes of interpreting in that a sight translator receives the message by reading instead of listening. The main difficulties of sight translation, therefore, may come from the presence of the source text and its characteristics. This study investigates difficulties of sight translation in an experiment. Ten graduate students of interpretation participated in the study. The difficulty level of two English texts (the independent variable) was assessed by a readability formula and analyzed to reveal its correlation with the performance of English to Chinese sight translation of these texts. Retrospective interviews were conducted to gather information about specific difficulties participants encountered while sight translating the two texts. The dependent variables were the scores of participants’ sight translation performance, length of the sight translation, number of false starts, number of words in the target language, number of pauses exceeding two seconds, scores of multiple-choice questions, and summary scores.
The major findings of the study are as follows:
1.Participants committed more errors and used more words in the target language when sight translating the text that was judged to be more difficult by the readability formula. Other dependent variables did not correlate with the readability formula assessment.
2.Sight translating long, complex sentences seemed to require short-term memory effort.
3.Sentence length seemed to be an indicator of sight translation text difficulty.
4.The greater the syntactic difference was between English and Chinese, the more difficult it seemed to translate the text.
5.While doing sight translation, most participants seemed to emphasize the norm of producing a smooth delivery over other norms.

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