The impact of text presentation on translator performance

Widely used computer-aided translation (CAT) tools divide documents into segments, such as sentences, and arrangethem side-by-side in a spreadsheet-like view. We present the first controlled evaluation of these design choices on translatorperformance, measuring speed and accuracy in three experimental text-processing tasks. We find significant evidence thatsentence-by-sentence presentation enables faster text reproduction and within-sentence error identification compared tounsegmented text, and that a top-and-bottom arrangement of source and target sentences enables faster text reproduction comparedto a side-by-side arrangement. For revision, on the other hand, we find that presenting unsegmented text results in the highestaccuracy and time efficiency. Our findings have direct implications for best practices in designing CAT tools.