RECENT TRENDS IN TRANSLATION STUDIES

What follows is a brief and very partial overview of some of the developing areas in translation studies that might offer leads to follow up for your own research. (It cannot be more complete given the limitations of time and space). The first and most established area is cognitive approaches and psycholinguistics,which draw from new observation technologies to explore how translators translated. Our second section looks at materiality and translation, which questions how the media we use for texts affect how we read and translate them. The third area I want to discuss is non-professional translation-- there is some overlap here with translation and conflict (as war interpreters are often untrained) but there are many other elements to discuss. Finally, we turn to work on translation technologies, which are shaping the professional experience of translation. At the end of all this, there’s atask for you to complete during the week. A list of referencesfollows at the very end. There is no set reading this week as your task involves reading a journal article.

Cognitive Approaches and Psycholinguistics

Translation studies, like many other disciplines, has been subject to new research approaches in the past decades, namely cognitive approaches. Such approaches aim to map behaviours to physical constraints (language, environment, memory, perception, attention etc.) in order to explain how processes happen. The rise of such approaches has led to a sharp increase in empirical research involving the practitioners themselves, i.e. translators and interpreters – professionals, trainees and trainers. For instance, cognitive approaches were used to justify the use of Think-Aloud-Protocol (TAP) to examine the working translation process of translators (e.g. Krings, 1986; Lörscher, 1991).

As a result of the increasing influence of cognitive approaches, translation studies has also turned to psycholinguisticsto study human language – both spoken and written – in terms of comprehension, production, learning, teaching and acquisition. The main aim of psycholinguistics is to document behaviours so as to make predictions about how processes happen and develop models. To do so, psycholinguistics research uses techniques such as eye-tracking, positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), amongst others. Not all these techniques can be used for the same conditions: TAP is not possible for simultaneous interpreting; eye-tracking is more relevant to translation, etc.

Because translation involves the use of two languages, psycholinguistic studies related to translation have also studied bilingualism. Bilingual language production models have been developed to account for simultaneous interpreting: how is it possible for interpreters to listen to a speech in language A while rendering it nearly simultaneously into language B without making mistakes? Like bilingual language production models, models for simultaneous interpreting use language tags to explain how interpreters switch off the language that is not needed in production (de Groot & Christoffels, 2007). This means that when simultaneous interpreters activate a word, this word contains a language tag (for instance, ‘chien’ would contain the language tag for French), which activates the language to be used (French in this case and not English or Spanish, etc.).

The question of language activation is also relevant for translation. However, it is not as pertinent. Translation constraints are quite different to interpreting constraints and have serious implications for empirical research. According to Jacobsen, translation is often divided into three main tasks: orientation, drafting, and revision. Is it fair to say that these three stages are really different? Do the same processes happen for each stage? How is it possible to observe the processes given that the entire translation happens over a long period of time?

 Recent developments in translation studies have seen the use of new experimental techniques. In 2006 O’Brien was the first to use eye-tracking experiments to investigate reading and writing while translating. Eye-tracking can reveal difficulties in comprehension (e.g. difficulties involve longer reading times, additional eye movement, pupil dilatation). Such techniques can reveal whether there are different stages or whether there is an overlap in stages.

The main aim of all this experimental research is of course to document processes but it is to also guide practice, teaching and learning of translation and interpreting. Cognitive approaches have allowed the use of replicable and scientific methods in translation studies research leading to ‘cognitive translatology’ (Muñoz Martín, 2010). They have also broadened the horizon in translation studies as they are by nature interdisciplinary (e.g. psychology, computer science, linguistics) and view translation and interpreting processes in context. In our next section, we look at a different form of context: materiality.

Translation and Materiality

In this section, we focus on the question of materiality in translation, which is an emergent topic but one that is becoming increasingly important as there is a cultural shift toward using digital texts and distribution. Materiality asks how the medium used for text production (manuscript, print, screen) affects how texts are both produced and received. The recent shift toward more digital forms of texts is a significant change in how texts are produced and how they are read, similar to the change introduced to perceptions of texts that was brought about by the shift from manuscript to print. In order to understand this, it’s necessary to consider perspectives from media studies as well as translation studies.

In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan argues that it is the ‘medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action’ (2001, p. 9). In other words, a medium will shape how it’s used and what is possible within it (though not everyone would agree with the level of determinism in McLuhan’s statement). Reading a newspaper in print is a different experience to reading the same newspaper online: there is a tactility to newsprint that is experienced in the fingers, as well as a different way of reading printed text compared to on screen text (this is discussed in Carr 2010). In addition, printed newspapers offer juxtapositions of content (advertising and other articles). There are also social differences to reading print and online which affect the reading experience: a newspaper is read often as a collection of articles, often while sitting, sometimes as a way of relaxing. Reading news articles on your phone is a different experience: perhaps standing in a queue or in some other way to fill time, one article at a time, perhaps as the result of a recommendation on social media. These social settings affect how we pay attention to texts and what sorts of meanings we create from them. While social settings, might not seem immediately related to media, it is the way in which media integrate into our lives that affect their social uses: if you buy a physical paper, that paper will have a different social function than just checking a website on your phone due to its size and physicality (e.g. its portability, the fact that you need space to read it and so on).