Text Simplification In A Case Study With A Translation Student With Asperger’s Syndrome.

Abstract

The aim of our paper is to present a case study carried out with a Translation and Interpreting student with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) in the framework of the e-learning project “TRADICOR: Corpora Management System for the Teaching Innovation in Translation and Interpreting” (PIE13-054). Our hypothesis is the following: when students with AS translate texts, simplification at two levels (text simplification and instructions simplifications) represents an improvement on translation quality and entails a better understanding of instructions. To confirm this hypothesis, the following four goals have been established: 1) apply text implification to instructions in Spanish and to source texts in Spanish using Anula’s recommendations; 2) checking the readability of the Spanish simplified and non-simplified source texts and instructions using two Spanish formulae: the Flesch-Szigriszt Index and the Fernández Huerta Index; 3) assessing target texts using Toledo Báez’s analytic assessment template in order to check whether text simplification implies an improvement on translation quality; 4) test whether the participant has better understood simplified explicit instructions than non-simplified explicit instructions. As a summary of the results, it has been proven that instructions simplification does have a positive impact on the comprehension and the participant could accomplish the assignment. However, non-simplified instructions hinder comprehension as the participant was not able to accomplish the assignment. Regarding translation quality, the difference between simplified texts and non-simplified texts is not relevant and texts show similar errors.