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Translation as an act and event: Exploring the interface
Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
Birgitta Englund Dimitrova, Stockholm University, Sweden
Until relatively recently, there has been an invisible line in translation studies between cognitive research (e.g., mental processes, attitudes) and sociological research (status, institutions). This panel focuses on how the translation 'act' is affected by the translation 'event' (cf. Toury 2012). The translation act can be considered what happens in the human brain, the cognitive processes as reflected in observable practices, which has been the focus of much of the translation process research done in the past 20 years. The translation event is seen to involve not only the individual translators and interpreters, but also the agents and organizations that impinge on their situated activities.
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Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow has a PhD in experimental linguistics from the University of Alberta, Canada. She is Professor of Translation Studies at the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), Switzerland. Her research interests include translation processes, translation in the news, conceptual transfer, and cognitive ergonomics. She is currently principal investigator of the Cognitive and Physical Ergonomics of Translation research project, a follow-up of the Capturing Translation Processes project.
Birgitta Englund Dimitrova has a PhD in Slavic Linguistics and is Professor Emerita of Translation Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her main research interests are in cognition, bilingualism and translation, as evidenced by her monograph Expertise and Explicitation in the Translation Process (Benjamins, 2005). Recently, she coedited two process-oriented special issues of Translation and Interpreting Studies. She has also published on the interaction in interpreter-mediated encounters and on the translation of dialect in fiction.
SESSION PLAN
PANEL INTRODUCTION (10 minutes): Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow & Birgitta Englund Dimitrova
PART 1: Translation as an Act and Event
PAPER 1 (20 minutes)
Title: Translation in the medical context: specificities of an interdisciplinary and dynamic system
Speaker: Isabel Garcia-Izquierdo, Universitat Jaume I
PAPER 2 (20 minutes)
Title: Translation without the originals: Chinese (auto-)biographical truth across into English
Speaker: Pei Meng, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics
PAPER 3 (20 minutes)
Title: From loner to team player: studying the translator's cognitive processes in a changing professional landscape
Speaker: Birgitta Englund Dimitrova, Stockholm University
PART 1 DISCUSSION (40 minutes)
PART 2: Exploring the interface
PAPER 4 (20 minutes)
Title: Acts, events and the coherence of the conceptual apparatus of cognitive approaches
Speaker: Ricardo Muñoz Martín, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
PAPER 5 (20 minutes)
Title: The situated act of translation: Incorporating feedback loops into the system
Speaker: Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow & Gary Massey, Zurich University of Applied Sciences
PART 2 DISCUSSION (30 minutes)
PANEL WRAP-UP (20 minutes): Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow & Birgitta Englund Dimitrova
PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES
PAPER 1
Title: Translation in the medical context: specificities of an interdisciplinary and dynamic system
Speaker: Isabel Garcia-Izquierdo, Universitat Jaume I
Abstract:
Written medical translation presents some characteristics that make it particularly complex. Firstly, it is an interdisciplinary field, since health professionals (doctors and nurses), experts in translation and languages, and, in the current situation, experts in communication technology are all involved in the medical translation/communication process. Secondly, it takes place in a dynamic context, since it has to respond to social needs (Montalt & García-Izquierdo, forthcoming), especially concerning communication, which can be asymmetrical (expert-to-layman communication), interlinguistic and intercultural. Thus, written medical communication is situated somewhere on a continuum that ranges from popularisation (genres written by experts and addressed to laymen, which sometimes need intergeneric - intra and interlinguistic - translations) to the highest specialisation (expert-to-expert communication; Cabré, 2004), in which equifunctional or equigeneric translation prevails (García-Izquierdo & Montalt, 2014). To deal with the complexity of this interdisciplinary, interlinguistic and multi-oriented (layman and experts) context, the researcher needs to use qualitative (interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, etc.) and quantitative (corpora, expert knowledge management systems, etc.) methods, involving all participants in the communicative process, which enable him/her to triangulate results from different sources. This paper presents the design and first results of the qualitative and quantitative research carried out by the Gentt group (Textual Genres for Translation, http://www.gentt.uji.es) in the context of a research project funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (2013-2015). The practical aim of the research can be understood in terms of both the translation act and the translation event, because it is twofold: i) With regard to the event, to improve written communication aimed at national and foreign patients in the Spanish context (especially hospitals) and thus to improve social interaction and ii) with regard to the act, to provide medical translators (English-Spanish) with useful resources by means of an expert documentation management system (García-Izquierdo & Borja, 2014) that includes a list of patient information genres in English and Spanish; a corpus of real documents; a list of documentary resources; International, European, Spanish, UK and USA legislation related to these genres; and monolingual and bilingual glossaries. It is expected that all these resources will enable translators to improve production of the genres involved in the new context
Bionote: Isabel García-Izquierdo is a professor in Applied Linguistics for Translation in the Department of Translation and Communication at the Universitat Jaume I, in Castellón (Spain). From 2000 onwards, she has been the director of the research group GENTT (Géneros textuales para la traducción, www.gentt.uji.es), which focuses on the multilingual analysis of textual genres in the framework of specialised communication applied to translation. Isabel García-Izquierdo has published several books as well as national and international articles related to her research. She is the President of AIETI (Asociación Ibérica de Estudios de Traducción e Interpretación).
PAPER 2
Title: Translation without the originals: Chinese (auto-)biographical truth across into English
Speaker: Pei Meng, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics
Abstract:
This paper examines the cultural, social and ideological factors that have mediated the selection, translation and edition of three Chinese (auto-)biographies into English for British audiences. The three Chinese autobiographies, namely Red Dust by Ma Jian, Daughter of the River by Hong Ying and Good Women of China by Xin Ran, offer accounts of individuals' adversities under the 'Communist China' primarily revolving around the Chinese Cultural Revolution. A remarkable feature about these three works is that the originals had been translated and published, and then became best sellers in the UK, well before the Chinese originals came out in Chinese-speaking countries. To explore 'the system that accounts for what is rather than what ought to be' (Inghilleri 2005: 142), this research, seeing translation as a socially discursive activity, moves away from the textual analysis of the end product towards an examination of the social, political and cultural contexts in which translation acts are constituted (Wolf, 2006). It reports on findings from a qualitative piece of research on the social, interpersonal and institutional dynamics of the translation of Chinese (auto-)biographies and their impacts on the process and outcome of translation. Based on semi-structured interviews with the literary agent, editors, translator and authors who were involved in the various stages of translations, this paper focuses on the mediating position of social agents and their interactive relationships within institutional contexts that shape the final translated output for the British book market. In this research, Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital and habitus, which are essentially concerned with explaining the relationship between individual activity and objective structure (Inghilleri 2003), are employed to analyse the structure of the various fields where translation activity occurs. The translation of Chinese (auto-)biographies is viewed as a network of individual activities within institutionalised fields – literary and publishing fields – that are analysed to examine the logic internal to the field, and the stakes and interests that drive the translation activity and its outcome and product within the UK book market. The habitus of individuals, literary agent and publishers in particular is also analysed in light of the way the participants interact, negotiate and subscribe to rules, conventions and norms, such as the motivation for selecting the unpublished originals for translations, what translation should aim at, how it should be conducted and the way the editing is carried out. My findings suggest that the power relations underpinning the struggles, competitions, negotiations and collaborations within the publishing and literary fields shape the translation production where the social agents involved interact and negotiate to yield the final product for the British book market. The selection process is shown to be a decisive step in the process of translation, which to a great extent shapes the way the Chinese (auto-)biographies have been translated and edited. Translation is therefore conceptualised as operating within the parameters of institutional, cultural and literary conventions that steer the translation activity via complex negotiations embedded in certain power relations that come into play to shape the end-product of translation.
Bionote: Pei Meng works as a lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, China. She obtained both her MA and PhD degrees in the UK in the field of Translation Studies at the University of Birmingham and the University of Edinburgh, respectively. Her research interests centre on the areas of sociology and culture of translation, translation history and stylistic approach to translation. She teaches courses for both postgraduate and undergraduate students in translation theory, Chinese-English translation, contrastive studies and translation, research methodology as well as stylistics.
PAPER 3
Title: From loner to team player: studying the translator's cognitive processes in a changing professional landscape
Speaker: Birgitta Englund Dimitrova, Stockholm University
Abstract:
Research on the translation process has evolved from its beginnings in the 1980ies into a productive paradigm within Translation Studies (Muñoz 2014). Original points of departure were theories and methodologies mainly from psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, with data elicited mainly from short whole translation tasks performed alone by translators or students, and after some time, with due attention to ecological validity. Conclusions were drawn e.g. on different processes depending upon experience or under various experimental conditions, regarding the execution of the task and its subtasks (reading the source text, drafting the target text, revising while drafting, revising after drafting, etc.), as well as on problems and decision-making. However, in the last decade or so, IT and globalization have profoundly changed the translation profession(s): in the growing translation industry, there is increasing task specialization and cooperation, and translation management, other-revision, TM and MT + post-editing are regular parts of the process. Hence, the design of many process studies, both earlier and more recent, seems to reflect a translation concept that is in many ways outdated: a short source text and a lonely individual, doing the whole task herself. This raises the question of the validity of the findings of such process studies in these new professional contexts. Against a short background on recent translation profession developments, the main body of this presentation builds on two analyses, which are compared and contrasted: 1. a meta-analysis of selected earlier process studies on tasks and subtasks in the translation process; 2. an analysis of approx. 15 hours of interviews with approx. 10 very experienced Swedish translators, regarding their habitual translation process. Guided by questions based on results of earlier process studies, the interviews elucidate differences in approach and processing, depending on the amount of cooperation with other actors in the overall process and task division, but also source text length, text type and on individual process characteristics. The principal question to be answered is: To what extent are findings from earlier process studies, where the cognitive processes of "the loner" were analyzed (translating as an act, cf. Toury 2012, Chesterman 2013), also relevant and valid in contexts characterized by distributed tasks, where the translation process needs to be conceptualized as an event (Toury, Chesterman)?
Bionote: Birgitta Englund Dimitrova has a PhD in Slavic Linguistics and is Professor Emerita of Translation Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her main research interest is in cognition, bilingualism and translation, as evidenced by her monograph Expertise and Explicitation in the Translation Process (John Benjamins, 2005). She has also published on the interaction in interpreter-mediated encounters and on the translation of dialect in fiction. Her current research project, "The translator's individual space", investigates individual characteristics in the process and the target texts of very experienced translators working from more than one source language.
PAPER 4
Title: Acts, events and the coherence of the conceptual apparatus of cognitive approaches
Speaker: Ricardo Muñoz Martín, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Abstract:
Toury (2012: 67–68) distinguishes a cognitive dimension, or translation act, and a sociological dimension, or translation event, in every instance of translating. Chesterman (2013) adds a third dimension, that of translation practice, to study translation against the larger landscape of historical and cultural evolution. These distinctions seem appropriate when the field is considered as a whole, and sociological approaches are certainly needed for and welcome in a truly comprehensive and multidisciplinary Translation Studies. However, the goals, assumptions and methods of one TS strand are not necessarily compatible with those from another one, sometimes not even within a given framework. For instance, Olohan (2011) has warned about a possible terminological and conceptual clash within the sociology of translation (e.g., Wolf & Fukari 2007), and several researchers (e.g., Ehrensberger-Dow, Muñoz, O'Brien, Risku) have called for updating the cognitive paradigm used as a reference for translation process research. Crucially, nothing prevents the translation process from being studied from perspectives other than cognitive translatology (e.g., computer science, anthropology); there is also nothing in translation events that makes them exclusive territory for sociological approaches. Multidisciplinarity does not entail a division of labor—i.e., a compartmentalization of the object of study. It results from the potential overlap of comprehensive analyses of the full object of study. Cognitive translatology (Muñoz 2010a, 2010b) uses embodied-embedded cognition as a referential framework and, in order to ensure internal coherence, also draws from it and from (cognitive) social psychology to study the interpersonal and cultural aspects of the cognitive processes of translators, interpreters and other agents, such as addressees. When translating is approached as an embodied-embedded activity—and not only as a rational, conscious problem-solving process or a sequence of problem-solving processes—each instance of translating is cognitively situated in a social, historical and cultural milieu. Cognition is enacted by the brain but in a constant interplay with "external" factors. Thus, current cognitive models of translating need to be enlarged to cover translation acts, events, and practices because they are only different aspects of cognitive experiences and processes: the translation act includes the translation event and unfolds along the lines of a given translation practice, and they all are built and represented in the mind of the translator and impact on her performance. This stance will be supported with references to recent works by several researchers but also with empirical data from a set of small-scale studies.
Bionote: Ricardo Muñoz has been a freelance translator since 1987 and was ATA certified for English-Spanish in 1991. Muñoz is the coordinator of the research team "Expertise & Environment in Translation" (PETRA, Spanish acronym), which focuses on the empirical research of the cognitive processes of translators and interpreters. He is also a member of the TREC Network. Muñoz is currently Professor in Translation Studies at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Brief CV: http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/ricardo-munoz-martin/ Selected publications: https://ulpgc.academia.edu/RicardoMunoz
PAPER 5
Title: The situated act of translation: Incorporating feedback loops into the system
Speaker: Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow & Gary Massey, Zurich University of Applied Sciences
Abstract:
Professional translation is a cognitive activity that is necessarily situated in a physical setting within an organizational structure. Most translators work within dynamic systems that require various degrees of collaboration with clients, peers, and other colleagues coupled with intensive human-computer interactions. In addition to the usual office equipment and communication systems, the typical setting of professional translation includes language technology tools designed to relieve translators of repetitive tasks and to increase their efficiency. The implicit assumption behind deploying such tools is to have machines do what they do best in order to let humans do what they do best – creative work requiring intense use of cognitive resources. The organization usually determines which tools are appropriate for which tasks, with more, less, or even no input from the ultimate users. Time and economic pressures often preclude the good practice of structured, systematic feedback loops.
On the basis of a large corpus of translation processes recorded at professional translators' workplaces over the past few years as well as translator commentaries, interviews, and survey results, we claim that the increasing segmentation of the translation process and consequent increased number of agents involved in the translation 'event' (cf. Chesterman 2006, 2009) is restricting translators' autonomy and decision-making in the cognitive 'act' of translating (cf. Toury 2012). While engaging in a demanding bilingual cognitive activity, the translators we have observed and interviewed indicate that they are struggling to manage their responsibilities to a range of actors and factors (the source text, target language norms, readership needs, client style guides, and reputation issues) as they deal with the economic and temporal pressures to which they and their organizations are subject (cf. Ehrensberger-Dow & Massey 2013). Findings from our workplace studies suggest that disturbances in the workflow or non-optimal ergonomic conditions can throw this complex system out of balance, increasing translators' mental load (cf. Muñoz 2012) and potentially preventing them from using language technology efficiently or from producing the quality that they are capable of. In addition, the professional translators we have investigated often have little opportunity to receive constructive feedback on their work, actively increase their expertise, or express their needs to language technology developers. We argue that it is not enough to rely on advances in external language resources or on cursory target-text revision processes. Instead, organizations would do well to exploit the expert knowledge of their human translators by incorporating effective feedback loops into every stage of the workflow.
Bionote: Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow is Professor of Translation Studies, teaching on the BA and MA programmes in the ZHAW Institute of Translation and Interpreting. She is principal investigator of three nationally funded research projects, two of which focus on translation workplace processes and the cognitive and physical ergonomics of translation. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Gary Massey is deputy head of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), director of its MA in Applied Linguistics and past head of its undergraduate degree programmes. His research interests include translation processes, translation pedagogy, and information literacy for translators. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.