Decision-Making and Revision Behavior in Chinese-to-English Translation: Evidence from English Majors Translating China-Focused Narratives.

Abstract

As China-focused narratives increasingly enter international circulation, Chinese-to-English translation has become a site of meaning negotiation rather than a straightforward linguistic transfer. For student translators, the primary challenge extends beyond lexical selection; it involves deciding how to render culturally saturated references, evaluative stances, and narrative positioning for readers outside the source context. This study examines the real-time decision-making and revision behaviors of 72 English majors translating China-focused narratives. Using a process-product design, the research integrates keystroke-logging data collected with Translog-II, translation product evaluations, and an auxiliary danmu (time-synced commentary) corpus treated as an audience-salience layer rather than as a direct measure of segment-level linguistic difficulty. Translation processes were analyzed across pause duration, revision frequency, revision location, and stage distribution, while product quality was assessed through expert rating and targeted coding of culture-related segments. A corpus of 18,642 danmu comments from 24 Bilibili videos was used to identify publicly salient narrative themes and culturally sensitive expressions. Results show that culture-loaded and evaluatively dense segments triggered longer pauses, increased recursive revisions, and denser mid-process reformulations. Higher-quality translations were associated with selective, strategically timed revisions at the discourse and cultural-adaptation levels rather than with a higher total revision count. The overlap between danmu-salient narrative triggers and high-effort translation segments is interpreted as convergent evidence of audience salience and translator processing pressure, not as evidence of causation. The study advances research on the translation process by linking revision behavior to culturally embedded narrative translation and offering implications for translator training in cross-cultural communication.