This article reports on an eye-tracking study of the process of dubbing translation. Dubbing translators had their eye movements monitored and recorded while they translated a part of an animated television show from English into Danish. The aim of the study is to explore the production aspect of dubbing translation and to investigate the cognitive processes which underlie the potentially complex task of dubbing translation. Measures of fixation duration, visual transitions and pupil size were used to investigate the translators’ distribution of attention, the processing flow in dubbing translation and cognitive effort during the translation process. It was found that the target text manuscript in dubbing translation attracts the majority of visual attention during dubbing translation. With respect to cognitive effort, it was found that fixations were considerably longer when the dubbing translators worked with the target text, which, a priori, was taken as an indication of more intense processing during target text processing. It turned out, however, that the longer fixations, in part, had to do with the mechanical operation of typing and that working with the audiovisual material was in fact more cognitively demanding than any other part of dubbing translation as pupil sizes were considerably larger when the translators worked with the film sequence. Working with aural and visual information in addition to textual information was considered a likely explanation for the increased workload on the translators’ cognitive systems.
