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Translation and interpreting in bilingual and monolingual communities
Abstract
Community translation and interpreting occur regularly in a variety of contexts when people who do not share a common language need to communicate. In the past several decades, scholars have taken a keen interest in understanding translator and interpreter cognition of bilinguals engaged in community translation and interpreting. A few terminological distinctions are necessary to situate scholarship on cognitive translation and interpreting studies and bilingualism given the range of profiles exhibited by community interpreters and translators. An important element of expertise in translation is the question of metacognition or monitoring, wherein translators are able to self-reflect on their practice in order to make decisions based on previous knowledge or experience. An untapped area of scholarship that bridges bilingualism, community translation and interpreting, and cognition is the role that language potentially plays in mediating decision-making and ethical behaviors.
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The Routledge Handbook of Translation History presents the first comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this multi-faceted disciplinary area and serves both as an introduction to carrying out research into translation and interpreting history and as a key point of reference for some of its main theoretical and methodological issues, interdisciplinary approaches, and research themes.
The Handbook brings together 30 eminent international scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, offering examples of the most innovative research while representing a wide range of approaches, themes, and cultural contexts. The Handbook is divided into four sections: the first looks at some key methodological and theoretical approaches; the second examines some of the key research areas that have developed an interdisciplinary dialogue with translation history; the third looks at translation history from the perspective of specific cultural and religious perspectives; and the fourth offers a selection of case studies on some of the key topics to have emerged in translation and interpreting history over the past 20 years.
There is considerable debate about whether bilingual children have an advantage in executive functioning relative to monolingual children. In the current meta-analysis, we addressed this debate by comprehensively reviewing the available evidence. We synthesized data from published studies and unpublished data sets, which equated to 1,194 effect sizes from 10,937 bilingual and 12,477 monolingual participants between the ages of 3 and 17 years. Bilingual language status had a small overall effect on children's executive functioning (g = .08, 95% confidence interval = [.01, .14]). However, the effect of language status on children's executive functioning was indistinguishable from zero (g = -.04) after we adjusted for publication bias. Further, no significant effects were apparent within the executive-attention domain, in which the effects of language status have been hypothesized to be most pronounced (g = .06, 95% confidence interval = [-.02, .14]). Taken together, available evidence suggests that the bilingual advantage in children's executive functioning is small, variable, and potentially not attributable to the effect of language status.
The main aim of the study is to investigate the process of interpreting emotionally-laden content in the two directions (i.e., L2>L1 vs. L1>L2). In line with previous research on bilingual-ism, there is a psychological distance when processing the non-native relative to the native tongue, reflecting a decreased sensitivity to affect-laden stimuli in L2 compared to L1. Yet thus far only little attention has been devoted to investigating how interpreters process emotionally laden as compared to neutral stimuli when interpreting. Additionally, in the context of language processing in interpreting, previous studies have shown an interpreting asymmetry , pointing to more cognitively taxing operations engaged in interpreting in the L1-L2 than L2-L1 direction; however, it remains under-investigated whether emotion processing might be modulated by interpreting directionality. To this aim, in the present pilot study, five professional interpreters were asked to interpret negatively-valenced as well as neutral sentences, both from Polish (L1) into English (L2) and in the opposite direction. To measure emotional responding , skin conductance (SC) method was triangulated with a self-report measure (SUPIN S30, the Polish adaptation of the PANAS questionnaire, Positive and Negative Affect Schedule). The obtained results showed an increased emotional responding, as reflected in SC results, in the process of interpreting a negatively-valenced compared to neutral content, irrespective of interpreting direction. The obtained results may contribute to research on emotional language processing in the context of interpreting.
This article discusses research in the field of bilingualism that has the potential to inform the related, albeit disconnected, field of Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies (CTIS). It reviews issues such as lexical access and the multilingual mental lexicon, inhibitory control and the "bilingual advantage debate". This debate refers to the question whether bilingualism leads to cognitive advantages that monolinguals do not develop. Although these claims have not been fully tested in translators and interpreters-both novice and advanced professionals-it is plausible that if there are indeed cognitive advantages that arise from managing "two languages in one mind", such benefits may correlate with neural and cognitive changes due to the training, accumulated experience and expertise of translators and interpreters. These topics merit inclusion in the expanding set of prominent research themes in CTIS. Future research in CTIS can use findings from bilingualism and the bilingual advantage debate to account for the peculiarities of translational cognition.
Retrospective verbal process tracing is a popular research method in Interpreting Studies, employed by a growing number of scholars, particularly in studies of conference interpreting, but, to date, it has not been widely employed in studies of dialogue interpreting. This paper begins by introducing process-tracing methodologies, defining types of verbal process tracing, and presenting a brief critical review of publications employing this research methodology. The bulk of the article provides concrete, practical information and guidance for scholars of dialogue interpreting who are interested in employing retrospective process tracing in their research. We discuss the theoretical underpinnings of the method, methodological considerations that must be taken into account in the design and procedure of such studies, data analysis and reporting on the basis of retrospective process tracing, and recommendations for best practices.Resumen: El seguimiento retrospectivo verbal de procesos se utiliza cada vez más en los Estudios de Interpretación, sobre todo en la interpretación de conferencias. Con todo, este método se ha utilizado poco hasta la fecha en el campo de la interpretación bilateral. En la primera parte de este artículo, presentaremos los métodos de seguimiento de procesos, definiremos los tipos de seguimiento verbal de procesos y examinaremos brevemente algunos estudios que han empleado estos métodos. El objetivo principal es ofrecer recomendaciones concretas y prácticas que puedan resultar útiles para aquellos investigadores en interpretación bilateral que se interesen por estos métodos. Presentaremos las bases teóricas, las consideraciones metodológicas relevantes para el diseño y el procedimiento de tales estudios, el proceso de análisis y presentación de los datos obtenidos a través del seguimiento retrospectivo y algunas recomendaciones de buenas prácticas.
This article argues that the use of interpreting settings as theoretical categories is no longer empirically sound. Instead, research should focus on the commonalities of all interpreting practice. This move is viewed as an enabling shift for the creation of Comparative Interpreting Studies, a strand dedicated to considering interpreting as a global practice. After discussing the rationale for the current use of interpreting settings as analytical categories, evidence from a variety of existing settings is used to illustrate the commonalities between all instances of interpreting and the fuzziness of the boundaries between these settings. It is argued that using interpreting settings leads to silo thinking, where researchers focus on research in the setting in which they are working, even when findings from other settings can be applied. The article ends with a discussion of the theoretical and practical potential of this move including the power of a comparative approach.
Previous studies have investigated the cognitive processes of simultaneous interpreting and translation using eye-tracking. No study has yet utilized eye-tracking to investigate cognitive load and cognitive effort in dialogue interpreting. An eye-tracking study was conducted on two groups of interpreters (experienced and inexperienced) with varying language backgrounds during a staged dialogue interpreting session. The aim of the study was to explore gaze patterns in dialogue interpreting in relation to the interpreters’ action and translation direction. The results indicated there were differences in gaze patterns depending on the action and the language used. Participants averted gaze more when interpreting into the allophone language (the L2 for a majority of the participants in this study). This may indicate that interpreting into L2 in a dialogue may involve more cognitive effort than interpreting into L1. Finally, gaze patterns did not differ significantly between inexperienced and experienced dialogue interpreters.
Language brokering is an informal translation practice found in language contact and immigrant contexts where bilingual children and adolescents serve as translators for family members. Language brokering research has yielded mixed findings on its outcomes on emotional well‐being and academic achievement. A lesser studied area has been the examination of the long‐term cognitive and linguistic effects of language brokering experiences. Considering the pervasiveness of immigration and language contact both in the United States and around the world, this paper posits that language brokering is a multidimensional collective experience resulting from structural and familial factors (e.g., immigration and policy) that has implications for emotional, linguistic, cognitive, and sociocultural processes for the broker and the broker's family. By providing an overview of recent research on the cognitive and linguistic impact of language brokering experiences, this paper focuses on the potential lasting effects of this experience and identifies potential areas of future investigation for bilingualism researchers.
Research on technology-enabled and technology-mediated interpreting to date has taken a largely product-oriented approach to understand the role of technology during interpreting. In response to calls for additional empirical research on the intersection of interpreting, technology, and cognition, this article argues for the inclusion of process-oriented research and outlines several areas of potential investigation.
Fins ara, la recerca sobre la interpretació assistida i intercedida per la tecnologia ha adoptat un enfocament centrat principalment en el producte per tal d'entendre el paper de la tecnologia durant l'exercici de la interpretació. A fi de respondre a la necessitat d'una recerca empírica addicional sobre la intersecció entre la interpretació, la tecnologia i la cognició, aquest article posa de manifest la necessitat d'incloure una recerca orientada al procés de la interpretació i determina diverses àrees de recerca de possible interès.
Hasta el momento, la investigación sobre la interpretación asistida y mediada por tecnología ha adoptado un enfoque centrado principalmente en la interpretación como producto para entender el papel de la tecnología durante esta actividad. En respuesta a la llamada de investigación empírica adicional sobre las intersecciones entre interpretación, tecnología y cognición, este articulo aboga por la inclusión de investigación orientada hacia el proceso de la interpretación e identifica unas áreas de investigación de posible interés.
Research into dialogue interpreting has thus far focused on its interactional dimension. Only recently have cognitive approaches been introduced. This article uses the situated cognition and functional pragmatics paradigms to explain how a broad and holistic understanding of the (healthcare) set-up in which dialogue interpreting assignments take place enables interpreters to develop an awareness of the purpose-orientation of medical professionals’ (inter)action plan. This understanding forms part of an inferential mental backdrop that allows interpreters to go from bottom-up drifting to gaining top-down control over their task. On the basis of a corpus of 19 interpreter-mediated doctor-patient encounters, the article suggests that it is acting upon an integral background of understanding as inferential basis (rather than role) that empowers dialogue interpreters to perform successfully.
Recent studies indicate that heritage language speakers have professional opportunities in translation and interpreting (e.g., Carreira, 2014a) because of their unique linguistic and cultural background. In addition, heritage language speakers' unique background and previous experiences as language brokers or non-professional interpreters or translators have also been suggested as an advantage in the context of translation and interpreting pedagogy (e.g., Valdés, 2003). The field of interpreting pedagogy, initially modeled and taught by professionals in the field based on their experience, has favored a more research-based interpreting pedagogy that draws on empirically-grounded studies focusing on interpreting competence and instructional strategies (e.g., Colina & Angelelli, 2015a). Despite the recent growth in research-based pedagogy, there is limited reflection on the challenges and opportunities heritage language speakers face in interpreting courses. Research has shown that heritage language and second language speakers exhibit a number of differences that have a direct impact on heritage language education (e.g., Potowski & Lynch, 2014; Carreira, 2016b); however, these differences have not been fully explored in the context of interpreter education. The present article contributes to this gap and encourages further work in this area by investigating the underexplored relationships among language for specific purposes, heritage language education, and translation and interpreting. In doing so, this work aims to understand the role and profile of heritage language learners in interpreting courses and how existing skillsets may be better exploited to guide interpreter education. First, the literature on heritage language learners and education is reviewed in conjunction with interpreting pedagogy. Then, challenges and opportunities for this subpopulation of students are discussed while identifying potential avenues for additional investigation.
This article discusses different aspects of research ethics, the researcher’s voice and discretionary power in interpreting studies. Research ethics is laid down in international conventions, which in turn are reflected in national regulations and ethical vetting. Discretionary power is understood as the leeway for making conscientious decisions within the rules and regulations governing a certain field. Although research ethics in interpreting has as yet received little scholarly attention, it is important that the field discusses aspects such as informed consent and the collection, analysis and reporting of data. This article uses three case studies to discuss how researchers can handle such ethical issues. Interpreting researchers often are or have been active interpreters, and this is yet another potential challenge for the field. Such duality potentially means that the researcher needs to navigate two ethical systems, that of the interpreter and that of the researcher – systems that may come into conflict with each other. It may also entail the risk of the researcher’s voice taking over the participants’ narrative.
Editing and revision are regularly incorporated into professional translation projects as a means of quality assurance. Underlying the decision to include these tasks in translation workflows lay implicit assumptions about what constitutes quality. This article examines how quality is operationalized with respect to editing and revision and considers these assumptions. The case is made for incorporating revision into translation quality assessment models and employs the concepts of adequacy, distributed cognition, and salience – and their treatment in the research on cognitive translation processes, post-editing, and translation technology – in order to re-think translation quality.
Machine-translated segments are increasingly included as fuzzy matches within the translation-memory systems in the localisation workflow. This study presents preliminary results on the correlation between these two types of segments in terms of productivity and final quality. In order to test these variables, we set up an experiment with a group of eight professional translators using an on-line post-editing tool and a statistical-based machine translation engine. The translators were asked to translate new, machine-translated and translation-memory segments from the 80-90 percent value range using a post-editing tool without actually knowing the origin of each segment, and to complete a questionnaire. The findings suggest that translators have higher productivity and quality when using machine-translated output than when processing fuzzy matches from translation memories. Furthermore, translators' technical experience seems to have an impact on productivity but not on quality.
Previous work has shown that prior experience in language brokering (informal translation) may facilitate the processing of meaning within and across language boundaries. The present investigation examined the influence of brokering on bilinguals' processing of two word collocations with either a literal or a figurative meaning in each language. Proficient Spanish-English bilinguals classified as brokers or non-brokers were asked to judge if adjective+noun phrases presented in each language made sense or not. Phrases with a literal meaning (e.g., stinging insect) were interspersed with phrases with a figurative meaning (e.g., stinging insult) and non-sensical phrases (e.g., stinging picnic). It was hypothesized that plausibility judgments would be facilitated for literal relative to figurative meanings in each language but that experience in language brokering would be associated with a more equivalent pattern of responding across languages. These predictions were confirmed. The findings add to the body of empirical work on individual differences in language processing in bilinguals associated with prior language brokering experience.
Within the wider interdisciplinary framework of applied linguistics, conference interpreting research has long since incorporated the cognitive processing dimension. Looking at the impact of (unshared) knowledge of medical conversation structures on interpreting performance, this paper highlights the benefits of such an approach for community interpreting.
p>This article approaches interpreting in the public sector or “community” from the vantage point of the sociology of professions. The aim is to examine the interpreter function in light of the process of professionalization and concepts such as professional trust and the exercise of discretion. How well
does the interpreter function fulfill the criteria of being a profession? What is holding the process of professionalization back? In exploring these issues, I observe the interpreter function through the prism of a model of professionalization outlined by a group of Scandinavian sociologists (Molander &
Terum, 2008; Grimen 2008ab; Grimen & Molander, 2008). The model divides professionalization into performative and organizational aspects. What is the professional status of the interpreter in the public sector in terms of these aspects? The empirical data originate from chat discussions where students
with different working languages (WL) who are going through a blended course (30 ECTS) on interpreting, discuss issues of professionalization. The analysis shows that the interpreter function fulfills the criteria of the performative aspect, while the organizational aspect is less developed.</p
Investigating an important field within translation studies, Community Translation addresses the specific context, characteristics and needs of translation in and for communities. Traditional classifications in the fields of discourse and genre are of limited use to the field of translation studies, as they overlook the social functions of translation. Instead, this book argues for a classification that cuts across traditional lines, based on the social dimensions of translation and the relationships between text producers and audiences.
Community Translation discusses the different types of texts produced by public authorities, services and individuals for communities that need to be translated into minority languages, and the socio-cultural issues that surround them. In this way, this book demonstrates the vital role that community translation plays in ensuring communication with all citizens and in the empowerment of minority language speakers by giving them access to information, enabling them to participate fully in society. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/au/community-translation-9781474221665/#sthash.HsmpVqzE.dpuf
Translation process research (TPR) efforts seem at times unconcerned with the theoretical foundations they need to interpret their results. A pervasive theoretical approach within TPR has been the mind-as-computer view. This approach has fostered both mechanistic and functional explanations of the translation process, including semantic notions of meaning, unrealistic constructs of the mental lexicon, and reified notions of equivalence. Some consequences of the approach are illustrated with discussions in the realm of translation quality assessment (automated and combined metrics, rubrics based on error categorization, and the impact of human variables and factors) and the monitor model hypothesis and its recent developments. Alternative approaches that draw from 4EA cognition are sketched that suggest that meaning is encyclopedic; that it is a process that cannot be measured; that the mental lexicon is only an abstraction of a part of (world-) knowledge; and that the tendency to choose default translations follows from the very structure of the brain/mind and the minimax principle.
During the last decades, information technology has played a central role in the language services industry. Translators and technical writers take advantage of dedicated software to reuse already translated texts, to adhere to a customer-specific corporate language, to grant terminology consistency, and so forth. The final goal is to increase quality and productivity. Even if information technology did not have the same impact on conference interpreting, also the profession is undergoing some changes. Computer-assisted interpreting (CAI) tools have entered the profession only in recent years, but other, more general resources had already influenced the way interpreters work. This is not only challenging the way interpreting is performed, but it may have an impact on the cognitive processes underlying the interpreting task, even on some basic assumptions and theories of interpreting, for example the cognitive load distribution between different tasks during simultaneous interpreting. Yet, the academic debate is starting to take notice of these changes and their implications only now. As a consequence, it almost failed to shed light on and address the challenges that lay ahead: there have been relatively few empirical investigations on the impact of CAI tools; interpreting models have not been adapted accordingly; the didactics of interpreting has received almost no new technologies in their curricula and no proposal has been advanced to increase the quality of CAI tools and to meet interpreters’ real needs.
How do bilinguals experience emotions? Do they perceive and express emotions similarly or differently in their respective languages? Does the first language remain forever the language of the heart? What role do emotions play in second language learning and in language attrition? Why do some writers prefer to write in their second language? In this provocative book, Pavlenko challenges the monolingual bias of modern linguistics and psychology and uses the lens of bi- and multilingualism to offer a fresh perspective on the relationship between language and emotions. Bringing together insights from the fields of linguistics, neurolinguistics, psychology, anthropology, psychoanalysis and literary theory, Pavlenko offers a comprehensive introduction to this cross-disciplinary movement. This is a highly readable and thought-provoking book that draws on empirical data and first hand accounts and offers invaluable advice for novice researchers. It will appeal to scholars and researchers across many disciplines.
This study explores the emotional impact of contextually-relevant source texts (STs) and their influence on student translators’ behavior. During the first weeks of the Spanish COVID-19 lockdown, an experimental study was carried out in which 69 Spanish translation students were instructed to translate two English STs with different evaluative attitudes (i.e. optimistic vs. pessimistic) toward the COVID-19 crisis. The study explored whether the different optimistic vs pessimistic framing of the crisis would influence the students’ use of translation strategies (h1), their levels of anxiety (h2) and their levels of affect (h3) after both reading and translating the STs. Results revealed statistically significant differences between the two translation strategies analyzed (i.e. emphasis and attenuation), with more emphasizing strategies than attenuating ones, regardless of the group. Moreover, a significant effect of the interaction between text and group was also reported, which indicated an overall stronger inclination to alter ―either mitigating or emphasizing― evaluative language in the pessimistic text. A significant increase in participants’ levels of anxiety and negative affect was also found after the pessimistic framing as compared to the optimistic one. Data also pointed to differences between reading and translating in terms of the participant’s anxiety levels, with statistically significant higher anxiety scores after reading than translating.
FULL TEXT AVAILABLE AT: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.01.018
Our preferences and evaluations are often affected by contextual factors. One unavoidable context is language. We used an evaluative conditioning (EC) paradigm (pairing neutral stimuli with emotional or neutral stimuli) to investigate whether our evaluations are equally conditioned in a first (L1) and a second language (L2). An EC effect was observed in both languages, however, if in L1 it occurred independently of recollection of the pairing of the stimuli, in second language memory seemed to play a larger role. These results were confirmed using a more implicit measure (memory confusion paradigm). Overall, the results suggest that conditioning occurs both in L1 and L2 but is weaker and more sensitive to memory of the emotional stimuli in L2. The study is the first demonstration that EC is modulated by language and converges with recent findings showing that linguistic context can modulate our behaviours.
The goal of this study was to investigate the impact of repeated use of a metacognitive self-regulation inventory (MSRI) in translator self-training. Designed by the researchers, the MSRI includes the cognitive management strategies of planning, monitoring and evaluation. A pre-post comparison study was conducted with two groups of students. The data obtained from students' responses to the inventory, think-aloud protocols (TAPs), post-task interviews, and translation products assessments were analysed for triangula-tion purposes. The results show that an MSRI can be used as an effective tool for translator self-training. Specifically, repeated practice with the inventory in students' self-training processes can effectively increase their awareness of metacognitive self-regulation by diagnosing their strengths and weaknesses, assist them to transform declarative knowledge into procedural knowledge , promote top-down processing mode, and eventually influence the balance of their patterns of metacognitive self-regulation. Furthermore, the strengthening of metacognitive self-regulation encourages students to pay more attention to the communicative function of the translation, and ultimately enhances their translation quality, particularly in the aspects of clarity, vocabulary, mor-phosyntax, genre conventions, and translation's purpose and target audience. ARTICLE HISTORY
Whether acquiring a second language affords any general advantages to executive function has been a matter of fierce scientific debate for decades. If being bilingual does have benefits over and above the broader social, employment, and lifestyle gains that are available to speakers of a second language, then it should manifest as a cognitive advantage in the general population of bilinguals. We assessed 11,041 participants on a broad battery of 12 executive tasks whose functional and neural properties have been well described. Bilinguals showed an advantage over monolinguals on only one test (whereas monolinguals performed better on four tests), and these effects all disappeared when the groups were matched to remove potentially confounding factors. In any case, the size of the positive bilingual effect in the unmatched groups was so small that it would likely have a negligible impact on the cognitive performance of any individual.
This article adopts a meta-analytic research framework to examine the strength of the relationship between working memory and simultaneous interpreting. This quantitative analysis utilizes a random effects model to combine multiple studies in an examination of differences between professional interpreters and various comparison groups as well as the relationship between working memory capacity and interpreter performance. Moderating and control variables are discussed, and a classification scheme for work on these topics is proposed. Two moderating variables are examined by testing the difference between working memory tests relying on auditory and visual stimuli as well as storage tasks (short-term memory) and processing tasks (working memory). Published studies were collected from several field-specific databases by querying working memory and simultaneous interpreting as key terms, and then supplemented by reviewing references, searching Google Scholar, and reviewing the work of scholars known to work in the area. Results are indicative of differences between professional and comparison groups, with professional interpreters exhibiting greater working memory capacity. Additionally, an overall positive correlation was observed between working memory capacity and measures of the quality of simultaneous interpreting.
The language task of interpreting is demanding in memory, and interpreters are assumed to be better in short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) than matched bilingual controls. However, apart from consistent evidence supporting such an interpreter advantage in updating, there is no consensus in the literature regarding the existence of an interpreter advantage in memory spans. To solve the issue, the present meta-analysis synthesised 45 effect sizes from 10 primary studies, and found evidence supporting an interpreter advantage in both WM and STM spans. Such an advantage was more expressed in verbal memory tasks than in numerical/letter and spatial tasks, although the moderating effect was not statistically significant. Moreover, the level of interpreter expertise significantly moderated the presence of such an advantage, with no advantage for beginner interpreters and no difference in the advantage between intermediate and expert interpreters. Implications for interpreting training and bilingual advantages are discussed.
As the object of study of Cognitive Translation Studies (CTS) expands to encompass social and cultural aspects of multilingual communicative events, scholars face the challenge of combining research methods and analytical perspectives to investigate cognitive phenomena. While plurality has been so far considered transitory, eventually converging on a unified theory of translation, I propose to adopt a functional assessment framework for competing models in order to endorse epistemic pluralism. The development of cognitive translatology as an emergent tradition combining multifarious approaches presents a new epistemological landscape in which epistemic pluralism can be embraced, fostered and practiced for the benefit of producing new knowledge. Far from being a relativist stance defending that all systems of knowledge are equally useful or appropriate, pluralism entails an assessment framework, which I introduce, so that we can improve our empirical designs and streamline our theoretical frameworks.
Great effort has been made to define and to measure revision competence in translation. However, combined eye tracking and keylogging have hardly been applied in revision research. We believe it is time to apply these methods to the investigation of revision for further insights into this phase of the translation process. In an eyetracking and keylogging study, we compare translation students to professional translators who revised six English-German human pre-translated texts from the TPR-DB. The texts were manipulated according to an existing error typology by including errors from a set of six error categories. We examine the effect of the errors on early (first fixation durations, gaze durations) and late eye movement measures (total reading time, regression path) and on typing behaviour for the error types and professional translation experience. The results enable a detailed modelling of the revision process by determining the kind of behaviour associated with the recognition and correction of different error types. Differences in this behaviour between students and professional translators allow for conclusions regarding the effect of professional experience on the revision process.
Cognitive translation processes incorporate metacognitive activity due to the association with problem-solving behaviour, including the ability to recognize problems, propose solutions, and evaluate the effectiveness of solutions. Previous research has emphasized these aspects of the translation process in general texts; however, specialized translation merits investigation for insights into metacognitive activity of translators given the particular challenges that accompany texts in specialized areas. Medical translation, for instance, presents a unique set of problems given the domain-specific nature of the translation task. This study presents a qualitative analysis of a corpus comprising two different translation tasks, each with an accompanying reflective self-assessment, in order to identify indicators of task awareness, problem recognition, and solution evaluation. The results suggest that metacognitive activity is present in both translation tasks, but the type of behaviour changes over the course of an eight-week period that includes training in medical translation. This change over time points to the potential for developing metacognitive abilities during translation coursework and identifies specific aspects for potential future investigation related to specialized translation pedagogy.
We explore the origin of the foreign language effect on moral judgements by assessing whether language context alters the weight given to intentions and outcomes during moral judgement. Specifically, we investigated whether foreign language contexts, compared with native ones, may lead people to focus more on the outcomes of an action and less on the intentions behind it. We report two studies in which participants read scenarios in which the actor’s intentions and the resulting consequences were manipulated. As previously shown, people considered both the actor’s intentions and the action’s outcomes when assessing the damage, cause, moral wrongness, responsibility, and punishment deserved. However, although the foreign language context reduced the impact of intentions on damage assessment, the overall effect of intention and outcomes on these variables was mainly the same in the foreign and the native language contexts. We conclude that differential weighting of intentions and outcomes is unlikely to account for the impact of foreign language use on moral judgement.
Language still often represents a barrier for many citizens or minority-language speakers involved in legal proceedings. In some jurisdictions, court and police ‘interpreters’ (individuals who have no academic or professional qualifications, but have a reasonable grasp of the language) are allowed to work in public service settings on a regular basis. However, as Berk-Seligson (1990: 204) clearly states, “no amount of oath-swearing can guarantee high quality interpreting from an interpreter who does not have the necessary competency” (my emphasis).
But which qualities should legal interpreters have in order to interpret effectively? How does interpreted-mediated interaction work? Do utterances and the participants’ contextual assumptions influence each other in the construction of meaning? If so, how? Section 1 of this paper provides an overall critical review of literature on legal interpreters’ role perceptions and expectations. Section 2 focuses on legal interpreting publications drawn from pragmatics - in particular, (socio)-pragmatics (2.1) and relevance theory (2.2) - referring to the need for interpreters to achieve ‘pragmatic equivalence’ between the original and the interpreted utterance. In Section 3, I make a case for the co-existence of different theoretical frameworks to analyse and explain (legal) interpreter-mediated events (3.1) and give two examples of this two-pronged analysis from my corpus (3.2). Finally, I shall provide concluding remarks and pave the way for further analysis.
This chapter presents recent empirical evidence to illustrate how a different discipline, ergonomics, can provide insights into the physical, cognitive, and organizational factors that impinge on translation. The organizational factors may seem more relevant to staff translators, but freelancers are also part of a system of translational action. Feedback is recognized as an important aspect of organizational ergonomics. Because of their relative isolation, freelancers are especially at risk of not receiving sufficient feedback on the quality of their work. A lack of feedback can limit the opportunity to develop expertise and possibly affect job satisfaction. This could have serious implications for decision making, translation quality, and translators' health. Fostering an awareness of the impact of ergonomics on decision making and health can be encouraged once translators are in the workplace or incorporated into the curriculum of undergraduate and graduate programs.
This chapter introduces state-of-the-art work on creativity in translation process research (TPR). It describes the main data and results on the study of creativity in TPR. The chapter includes evidence on creativity work from four major research areas in translation studies: the notions of translation shifts, translation process, translator's agency, and translator training. Creativity is for the most part highly valued in translation. The study of creativity in translation studies initially places the focus of research on the target text in search of those changes or shifts from the source text that characterize a translation as creative. In translation studies, the novelty and relevance of target text features of creativity have been explored either directly, by analyzing translation shifts, or indirectly, by exploring translational norms. Psychologists who give emphasis to environmental influences in creativity research explore the ideal climate for creativity.
Cognitive approaches to translation and interpreting may be considered the oldest empirical research area of modern translation studies (TS). This chapter argues that what is happening is simply that the research area is getting crowded; that the old map of TS with its division of labor has become untenable; and that the theoretical edifice of cognitive approaches to translation and interpreting needs to strive for internal coherence, rather than trying to cohere with all approaches within TS. Conference interpreting had become an object of study proper for researchers of cognition when translation research started focusing on the development of machine translation systems, inspired by Noam Chomsky's views on language, which exceeded his generative framework. The chapter also explains two major cognitive trends TS researchers will be adhering to in the next years: computational translatology, and cognitive translatology.
Human interaction with machine translation (MT) takes three basic forms: evaluation, revision, and use. Evaluation and revision can be seen as intermediate processing stages, whereas use refers to end-user processing. The three forms of interaction share certain cognitive processes, for example, reading and comprehension, but the processes are not identical to each other. This chapter focuses on the first two forms of interaction. The chapter is divided into two main parts: it considers evaluation and the cognitive challenges involved and turns attention to post-editing as a complex cognitive task. MT evaluation arguably needs not only to move beyond the sentence level to the text level, but also to the level of the user by incorporating concepts such as acceptability and usability. The chapter explores the post-editing process by adding the dynamic connectionist model and situated cognition to help elaborate the complexity of the post-editing process.
Training1 is probably one of the most complicated and problematic aspects of Community Interpreting. The many issues surrounding training can be divided into four broad areas:
1.
lack of recognition for the need for training;
2.
absence of a compulsory pre-service training requirement for practising interpreters;
3.
shortage of adequate training programmes; and
4.
quality and effectiveness of the training.
We examine whether the use of a foreign language, as opposed to the native language, influences the relative weight intentions versus outcomes carry in moral evaluations. In Study 1, participants were presented with actions that had positive outcomes but were motivated by dubious intentions, while in Study 2 with actions that had negative outcomes but were motivated by positive intentions. Participants received the materials either in their native or a foreign language. Foreign language prompted more positive moral evaluations in Study 1 and less positive evaluations in Study 2. These results show that foreign language reduces the relative weight placed on intentions versus outcomes. We discuss several theoretical accounts that are consistent with the results such as that foreign language attenuates emotions (triggered by intentions) or it depletes cognitive resources.