Question 2 reads: Give as much information as you can find from the text, about the jobs they are now doing or have done. After having identified all the characters in the text which Question 1 requested subjects to mention, my assumption was that, in contrast to the first question, the identification of the diverse information relating to the characters would require careful examination of the various parts of the text. As can be seen in the ST presented above, much information about the characters are not made explicit in the ST. To retrieve as many facts about the characters as possible, it would be necessary to carefully read and reread the entire text in order to itemise and categorise the information. For example, a comprehensive profile of Gilles Pélisson would require the search for information about his age, behaviour, academic qualification, job experience, major shortcoming, and so on. CGs by their very nature require that data related to a particular concept be identified and linked with the concept. For CGs to be as comprehensive as possible, conscious effort is typically exerted to identify related information and link it to its appropriate relations. Figure 4.5 illustrates the above explanation.
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Figure 4.5: Conceptual graphs explaining Question 2
The concepts connecting the relations on the graphs represented in Figure 4.1, for the purpose of illustration only, could take a different form depending on how the information in the text is construed. Due to the time-consuming nature of drawing these graphs in a word document, sketches of them were made, with some of the relations (highlighted in green) provided as starting point. The rest of the graphs were empty. It is important to state that my decision to make an initial sketch of the CGs worked against many of the participants. As we will see in the manner in which many of them filled the graphs, several Group A members complained that the construction of their sketches were influenced by the restraint of construing the text similarly to the way I had done. Some participants’ inability to provide the correct information on the graphs (which had not occurred during the pilot study since they plotted the graphs from scratch on paper) brings to mind the perspectival nature of linguistic meaning-making (cf. Section 3.2.3.2). The individual differences characterising human thought processes, which influence the manner in which images are evoked from the phonological pole (words) and results in the creation of the semantic pole (meaning) must have played a prominent role here. While reading the ST, each participant’s cognitive grammar (their symbolisation, categorisation and integration of the text) depended on their personal perspectivations and all these were brought to bear on their graph-plotting exercise. The initial scaffolding therefore
Medef ignorance in the television industry Gilles Pélisson Character Major handicap Ambitious 50 and counting Work experience Educational qualification Age La Une organisation Organisation Chair of Novotel Member BOD CEO Accor Business tourism Bouygues Telecom boss Harvard MBA ESSEC Bachelors
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backfired instead of helping Group A participants setting up their conceptualisations of the text1.
As seen in the ST and in Figure 4.5, the profiles of Gilles Pélisson, spread all over the document, are linked by several relations. It was assumed that although reading in order to answer comprehension questions involves a more intentional text analysis, reading in order to plot CG would be more intentional. This knowledge, which the students had formed in the course of their training sessions and would be able to sketch in the same way very quickly with pen and paper, has elsewhere been equally emphasised in previous trainings on CG (see for example, Schärfe, Petersen & Øhrstrøm 2002). This was the motivation for assuming that Group A would provide more information and at the same time avoid major errors in their translation exercise. However, as the analysis shows, this assumption did not generally appear to be the case for all participants. As has previously been indicated about the main character in the text, Gilles’ co-referents or name sequences, in Common Logic (Sowa 2008:218), are found at multiple positions within each of the document’s three paragraphs. An eye-tracking study investigating how this information is collated would typically reveal heat maps showing the density of participants’ fixation on the areas where the information is retrieved. An example of this finding is demonstrated in Sharmin, Špakov, Räihä and Jakobsen (2008:35, 45) where the translator’s eye movements give a detailed picture of the complex processing involved in constructing meaning from the presence of an array of information related to a particular concept in a text. From the foregoing, it was therefore established that the foreign-language readers were liable to assign unrelated information to some of the individuals mentioned in the text.
Thus, a comprehensive profile of each of the characters of the text would take the form of the following example on Gilles Pélisson.
Gilles Pélisson:
i. got a new appointment as the CEO of TF1 ii. is ambitious
iii. in his fifties
iv. young compared to Paolini v. more qualified for the job
vi. is the former Accor chief executive (he left in 2010) vii. is a former director in an investment bank
1 A possible remedy for this phenomenon could be to develop a software that quickly creates boxes, arrows and circles at a point the mouse is clicked. By so doing, more time might be saved in the design of the CGs.
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viii. served as a board member of La Une, Medef ix. dabbled in some form of business tourism x. was born into a well-to-do family
xi. has a very robust CV
xii. gained managerial experience from working at Novotel xiii. schooled at ESSEC
xiv. obtained an MBA from Harvard
xv. led Euro Disney and Bouygues Telecom before 2006 xvi. has a good relationship with the owner of TF1
xvii. does not know much about working in the television industry
Other characters in the text include Gérard Pélisson, Nonce Paolini and Martin Bouygues. Although there is another person whose name is mentioned in the text, Jean Pierre Pernaut, there is no specific reference made about his job. In fact, to be able to understand his role in the text segment where he features, exophoric reference – reference outside the text – would be inevitable. For this reason, no consideration was given to whether or not this individual was mentioned in the students’ answers. The students were graded based on the amount of information they provided on each person in the text. For instance, if a student mentioned that Gilles Pélisson was board member of La Une and Medef, s/he was awarded two marks – one for being a board member of La Une and the other for being a board member of Medef. The question did not indicate that more marks would be awarded according to the amount of information provided; this was deliberately done in order not to induce any form of meticulousness in participants. It was believed that they would normally outline as many facts as they considered relevant to demonstrate their understanding of the text. It is also pertinent to mention at this point that in the training sessions on the use of CG, the students were not given any form of instruction on how to answer the comprehension questions. They were only taken through several exercises on how this form of external visualisation could assist them in the comprehension of the ST before translating. Tables 4.2 and 4.3 display subjects’ performance on Question 2. The students were not asked to provide information not found in the ST. The answers the students provided were marked based on their ability to provide the reader with answers clearly indicating the job experience of the characters. The answers to all the comprehension questions presented in this chapter (under the Detail column) are highlighted according to the quality of the responses. Grey highlighting indicates that the answers are correct while turquoise is used to indicate partially correct responses. Incorrect answers are in white font against black background. Therefore, a summary of the answers (under Summary) is as follows. R stands for the number of correct points scored. P indicates
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the total number of partially correct answers provided by each subject while W stands for the cumulative wrong answers given by the students.
Table 4.2: Group A members' answers to Question 2
Group A Detail Summary
PA1 Pélisson: hotel chain, investment banking, business tourism, board member of La Une and Medef, Euro Disney, Bouygues Telecom (previous) CEO of TF1 (current). Bouygues: Owner of TF1. Paolini: HR director dircom, DG of TF1, CEO of TF1 (previous) retired (current)
R: 11 P: 0 W: 0 PA2 Gilles Pélisson: is now the chief executive of TF1, was the CEO of Accor and worked at Medef and La Une ; Gérard Pélisson (uncle of Gilles) was the founder of Accor ;
Martin Bouygues was the CEO of TF1 but also Manager at dircom; Jean-Pierre Pernaut was also a CEO of TF1 ; Nonce Paolini is the now retired CEO of TF1.
R: 7 P: 1 W: 1 PA3 Gilles Pelisson has been a CEO, a director, a board member. Jean-Pierre Pernaut has been an HR manager, CEO. Nonce Paolini has been CEO of TF1 Gerard Pelisson was
the owner/CEO of Accor group Martin Bouygues was owner of TF1
R: 6 P: 1 W: 0 PA4 Gilles Pélisson – CEO of Accor, on the board of directors for la Une and Medef which are business tourism companies, worked at Euro Disney and Bouygues Telecom.
Martin Bouygues – owner of Bouygues Telecom and TF1 Gérard Pélisson – owner of the Accor group of hotels Nonce Paolini – Director general and CEO of TF1, Manager at dircom Jean-Pierre Pernaut – news reader and broadcaster
R: 10 P: 1 W: 1
PA5 Gilles Pélisson- Euro Disney boss, Bouygues Telecom chief, TF1 Chief Executive, A director of investment banking Martin Bouygues- Boss of Accor Gérard Pélisson- founder of the Accor Group Nonce Paolini- TF1 Chief Executive Jean-Pierre Pernaut- news reader and broadcaster
R: 6 P: 0 W: 1
PA6
Gilles Pélisson: Now TF1 Chief Executive, After 2010: Director of investment banking, business tourism, held board membership on ‘La Une’, Medef, 2006-2010: Accor Group CEO, at some point he was a Euro Disney boss and Bouygues Telecom chief Martin Bouygues: Owner of TF1, owner of Bouygues Telecom Gérard Pélisson: founded hotel group Accor. Nonce Paolini: Used to be TF1 chief exec, Human resources manager Jean Pierre Pernaut: dunno what he did
R: 13 P: 0 W: 0
PA7
Gilles Pélisson: Boss of Accor; managing investment funds; Administrative consultant (la Une); Executive consultant (Medef); business tourism; Manager of Euro Disney and Bouygues Telecom. Martin Bouygues: Owner of Bouygues Telecom. Gérard Pélisson: Hotel owner/founder. Nonce Paolini: Previous HR manger, dircom and general director of TF1.
R: 12 P: 0 W: 0 The total correct points scored by this group is 65. Members in this group obtained a total of three partially correct answers and three wrong answers. All of PA1’s answers were correct, with no incorrect or partially correct answers. Even though she could have provided more information in response to this question, she was only able to score a total of 11 points. In spite of the fact that she scored less than PA6, PA7 and PB1, who scored 13, 12 and 12 points respectively, she seemed to show some skills of an analytical student and some of the traits said to be exhibited by professional translators. For example, on a couple of occasions, she doubted and rejected certain dictionary propositions and chose to rely on context for the interpretation of the meaning of expressions, or considered a holistic style of dictionary check (Fraser 2000; Ronowicz, Hehir, Kaimi, Kojima & Lee 2005:592). Still, these studies and several others maintain that language students and certain student translators do not know how to analyse the nature of the problem before resorting to the solutions provided by dictionaries.
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PA1’s exhibition of expert behaviour, further explored in the analysis of the students’ translation products, was probably due to the fact that she sought minimal external reference, having verified the meaning of words and (most of the time) expressions for only 17 times. Furthermore, having spent a considerable amount of time (10 minutes 37 seconds) in the initial reading phase of the exercise, she seemed confident to have had a better grasp of the text’s meaning.
PA2, on the other hand, performed a fairly audible mental translation of the text during her initial reading task. This behaviour, which involved reading the ST in the target language, confirms Widdowson’s (2014) view that language students mentally read a foreign-language text in their mother tongue as a means of understanding the text, even when translation is not involved. Although PA2 showed at least one expert reader tendency in terms of not completely trusting dictionary outputs, she seemed to have struggled with working through the exercises. This led to a number of unsuccessful dictionary checks – more than twice the number of lookups done by PA1. Unlike PA1, who easily identified and fixed the concepts with their relations in the graphs, PA2 had a few problems graphically representing the portion of the text addressing Question 2. For example, she slotted Martin Bouygues in the position of Nonce Paolini and wrote in her answer to this question that Bouygues was the CEO of TF1 (same category of error committed by PA3, who wrote that Gérard Pélisson is the CEO of Accor). This answer is marked as partially correct because this is not what the text says. The correct information is that he is the owner of the television station as Gérard Pélisson is the owner of Accor. Although certain owners of a company may double as both the chairman and the CEO of the company, this is not the case for Martin Bouygues and Gérard Pélisson. PA2’s response that Bouygues is the manager at dircom is incorrect. This rather uncommon error was the result of her transferring all Paolini’s roles to Martin Bouygues. Again, the participant’s lack of knowledge in job positions led to her considering dircom as a place even though she said “… what’s dircom?” before referring to Reverso, an online language dictionary. This search did not yield any satisfactory result. Instead of resorting to Google or other online sources, which would have revealed that dircom means ‘director of communication’, she concluded, “… dircom is a place” and proceeded to other information. A summary of her performance in Question 2 suggests she obtained one wrong, one partially correct and a total of seven correct answers.
Indicating that Gérard Pélisson is the CEO of Accor, as has already been explained, is not entirely correct because this was not specified in the text. Therefore, PA3’s answer was marked
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partially correct. A review of the process data for PA3 indicates that she is a highly meticulous student who, during the experiment, preferred to be prudent with the amount of information she gave in order not to provide incorrect answers. As would be seen in subsequent data relating to this participant, her cautious approach played a significant role in all other tasks she performed. Even though she belonged to the second category of participants with intermediate level of proficiency, as a result of less exposure to the French language, she displayed some loss of confidence in the outputs of Reverso and decided to consult other electronic references. Consequently, the quest for more credible English options (to enable her to achieve a better comprehension) of some of the expressions in the ST, escalated her total lookups to 30. Within the 5 minutes 21 seconds she spent responding to Question 2, she provided six correct and one partially correct answers.
While PA4, like PA2, also construed dircom as a place, her answer was marked as partially correct because the position was assigned to the correct character, Nonce Paolini. On the other hand, the same response by PA2 was marked wrong since it was entirely attributed to the roles of Martin Bouygues. PA4’s answer that La Une and Medef are business tourism companies was not in the text and therefore was graded as incorrect. While she was in her first semester of the postgraduate diploma in translation, it was expected that she would be on the same level as most of the Language and Culture participants as her performance during the training sessions suggested. Nevertheless, she assumed, on account of miscomprehension, that tourisme d’affaires at the end of Paragraph 1 is an explanation of the category of La Une and Medef in the previous line. Judging from her false starts, her earlier activities gave the impression that she would not give sufficient information while answering Question 2 as well as other questions. Yet, her revision strategies, which distinguished her from many of the participants, helped smooth up her responses. The total time spent on this question was 10 minutes 37 seconds, the longest time for this group after PA7. This was caused by her frequent pauses and revisions to compare the answer with the STs and the graphs she plotted earlier.
In addition, PA5 wrongly assigns ‘Boss of Accor’ to Martin Bouygues, an error similar to the one committed by PA2. Again, this mistake is a result of the participant’s lack of involvement in the entire experiment. The user activity data shows, right from the initial point of the exercise, that she exhibited an overall behaviour that indicates obvious unwillingness to get committed. After a series of unsystematic and fruitless word searches, she said “I’m sorry I have to do this …” and resorted to the use of Google Translate. The suspicion that her facial expression indicated her lack of enthusiasm as she assessed the volume of work she had to do,
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was confirmed by the utterance, “I cannot translate this for you, Felix”. In spite of this limited involvement with the exercise, she managed to obtain six points within a total duration of 9 minutes 5 seconds.
The participant with the highest score for Question 2 is PA6. She neither provided any wrong information nor gave any answer that was incomplete. During the initial reading task, she only scanned through the text without properly reading it as the 2 minutes 1 second she spent on the task confirms. It was however when she was confronted with plotting the graph that she performed a thorough intentional reading considering the fact that she did not use any dictionary. Hence, she is the participant with the longest amount of time spent on graph- plotting, equal to the amount of time she spent on translation. Although there was no other case in this experiment to confirm my assumption, it was persuasive to suggest that the graphs served as a substitute to the use of dictionaries in her case. It was equally tempting to conclude here, along with Daems, Carl, Vandepitte, Hartsuiker and Macken (2016:113), that a significant amount of (translation) task time is spent consulting external sources, which (sometimes) does not guarantee quality of the TTs.
PA7, the only male participant in this group, obtained the second highest number of points for Question 2. He did not provide any wrong or partially correct answers but spent the longest amount of time tackling the question. Having also scored the highest point in the group in terms