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Study Design

While there is a fair amount of flexibility in how you set up a study for the TPR-DB, there are some important constraints:

  • Studies must be organized in sessions
  • Each session should have
    • a single participant
    • a single modality
    • a single source and target language

Sessions

A session is a single occurrence where a participant (human or machine) produces/reads a text along the lines of a certain modality.

Translation Session

A simple example is a professional translator reading and translating a text with Translog-II while their keystrokes are being logged and their gaze is being monitored with an eye tracker.

Post-Editing Session

Another simple example is a bilingual post-editing a text with Trados Studio while their keystrokes are being logged with the Qualitivity plugin.

Participants

A participant either needs to produce text, read text, or both. A participant can be a human (professional translator, researcher, student, bilignual, etc.) or a machine (neural machine translation model, large language model, agent, etc.).

Modalities

While there are some common modalities that are often used in translation process research (translation, post-editing, monolingual editing, simultaneous interpreting, sight translation, etc.), any activity or task that involves reading and/or producing a text can be a modality. Researchers have the flexibility of defining their sessions according to pre-determined, common modalities (these are described in File Naming) or describing custom modalities.