Investigating how we read translations

Since its inception, Translation Studies has hinged on theoretical concepts of effects and reception, with various reader-oriented notions such as equivalent effect, skopos, acceptability and adequacy, and user-centredness, to name but a few, having pervaded the discipline for decades. Despite this preoccupation with the phenomenology of translations, we still know very little about how translations are actually experienced – written translations especially. This article calls for an expansion of research into the reception and experience of source texts and their translations, reviewing the opportunities afforded by recent technological developments in eye-tracking, galvanic skin response sensors, echocardiogram monitors, and other multi-sensory devices. Using a short case study, a number of research questions and an outline of an experimental method are proposed to contrast the reading experience of two translations of the same source text, serving as a prompt for future research of this kind. By drawing inspiration from the few existing examples of research in this incipient paradigm and the considerations offered in the example, this article aims to stimulate future research to explore the vast untapped potential in this area and to arrive at a better understanding of the effects that different translation approaches yield and the potential variation in effects between source and target text.

Translation teams as cognitive systems

This paper aims to bring research on different forms of group-level cognition into conversation with Cognitive Translation Studies (CTS), the focal point of the paper being cognitive processes in translation teams. It is argued that an analysis of cognition in translation teams, which exhibit the properties of a cognitive system, needs to be placed on group-level. A case study of a team, translating the Hebrew Bible Book of Psalms into Swedish in the 1980’s, is presented. The empirical base for the case study consists of archival material in the form of draft translations and paratexts. The methodological question is thus raised whether, and if so in what way, cognitive processes may be analyzed retrospectively, and not only from a real time perspective. By treating the archival material as cognitive artifacts which have constituted an integral part of the team’s cognitive process, the question is tentatively answered in a favourable way. This, it is finally argued, opens up interesting possibilities for joining CTS with translator archives research, Genetic Translation Studies (GTS), and cognitive archeology.

Stress, cognitive, emotional and ergonomic demands in interpreting and translation

The autonomic nervous system is responsible for modulating peripheral functions in the human body and consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic branches. Its activation affects, among other things, heart rate, respiratory rate, salivation, perspiration, pupillary dilation, and blink rate. For some years now, physiological measurements have found their way into interpreting and translation studies to investigate, in particular, cognitive, emotional and ergonomic demands and stress in translating, interpreting and post-editing. We conducted a meta-review of publications from 1990 until 2020 in order to investigate the relevance of (a) the four constructs of emotional, cognitive and ergonomic demands and physiological stress and of (b) physiological data for translation and interpreting research. With our selection of search terms, we identified 369 publications investigating one of the four constructs, of which 28 use physiological data. Analysis of the 28 studies shows a tendency towards triangulating physiological with other types of data, which reflects the complexity of the investigated tasks and constructs. Moreover, there seems to be an effort to increase sample size, which is an important step towards more robust results in quantitative research in the field.

Towards a methodological toolset for the psycholinguistics of translation

The manuscript provides readers with a basic methodological toolset for experimental psycholinguistic studies on translation. Following a description of key methodological concepts and the rationale behind experimental designs in psycholinguistics, we discuss experimental paradigms adopted from bilingualism research, which potentially constitute a methodological foundation for studies investigating the psycholinguistics of translation. Specifically, we show that priming paradigms possess several inherent advantages which make them particularly suitable for research on translation. The manuscript critically discusses key methodological problems associated with such paradigms and illustrates the opportunities they may offer for translation research, concludes with a review of past and current translation process research highlighting ways in which these can contribute to the issues raised by cross-linguistic priming studies.

Joint creative process in translation

In this article, we explore socially distributed cognition (SDC) as a theoretical model of translation and investigate it empirically as an aspect of the collaborative and creative translation workflow. With the aim of developing a better understanding of SDC and collaborative workflows in translation, we analyzed two different settings where more than one person works on a translation: commercial specialized translation (CST) services, and the production of audio descriptions (AD) as teamwork between blind and sighted describers. The analysis focuses on how the process of co-creation unfolds in the communication that binds together the systems of SDC. While the process of co-creation was strikingly similar in the two different translation contexts, the differences were bound to channels of communication (with or without direct contact between participants), and the draft translation was identified as a central artifact that carries much of the communication when the participants do not work in the same space. With an emphasis on socially distributed cognition, our study provides a framework for both the cognitive and social aspects of translation and develops the understanding of collaborative translation processes. It also contributes to the development of translation practices by helping translation operators and trainers make choices between alternative workflows.

Bridging the epistemological gap

Despite Cognitive Translation Studies’ (CTS) interest in didactic applications, the actual impact of research on training programs has been modest in comparison with the advances made in terms of methodology, theoretical sophistication and expansion of the object of study. It is argued that the modest impact of CTS on training originates, on the one hand, in an epistemological problem – one of mild incommensurability – and, on the other, on the difficulty of developing realistic cognitive task models. Adopting constructs and models in CTS and didactics that share an embodied, extended view on cognition may contribute to fitting empirical data and describing skill development. To that end, a sketch of a template to develop translation task models is presented for discussion.

Literalization in the self-revision process of novice and experienced biomedical translators

This paper explores decision-making in translation focusing on the self-revision process of novice and experienced translators of biomedical content in the English to European Portuguese language pair. Adopting process- and product-oriented methods, an experiment was designed to study thirty translations of a 244-word instructional text about a medical device intended for health professionals. The data elicited from fifteen novice translators and fifteen experienced translators included keylogging and screen-recording data. These data were triangulated and analyzed to describe the translation solutions in the interim and final versions in response to problematic translation units and to test if, during the self-revision process, novice and experienced translators tend to proceed from more literal versions to less literal ones, or vice versa, in biomedical translation. Contrary to expectations, the analysis points towards a literalization phenomenon in the translators’ processes. The data also indicates that the tendency to proceed from less literal versions to more literal ones is more pronounced in novice translators than in experienced translators. The findings reported here shed new light on the self-revision processes of novice and experienced translators and their relationship with prevailing translation norms, and enable us to better understand the practices in place in professional biomedical translation.

Embodied cognition in the booth

From an enactivist perspective, cognition can be described as embodied, since it is determined by our bodily, multisensory, affective interaction with the environment, in particular by our social interaction. In recent years, interpreting has been defined as a multimodal, embodied cognitive activity of inter-lingual mediation, and research on gestures in conference interpreting has found that simultaneous interpreters, although not visible for their audience, do gesture in the booth. However, gestures in interpreting are yet understudied. This paper presents an exploratory, in-depth descriptive study with the aim of generating hypotheses about the cognitive functions of gestures in simultaneous interpreting. To this end, we investigate the different types of gesture that emerge throughout a whole process of simultaneous interpreting, in conjunction with the concurrent speech, the interpreter’s interaction with her environment and her own description of her production of mental images and gestures. The research question guiding our investigation is: What functions do the different types of gestures play in the interpreting process? The results suggest that, in the analyzed material, referential gestures tend to support the construction of meanings, while the main role of pragmatic gestures consists in helping to manage the progress of the interpreting process.