© Intercultural Studies Group Universitat Rovira i Virgili Plaça Imperial Tàrraco Tarragona Fax: (++ 34) What happens in translators’ brains? Anthony Pym

© Intercultural Studies Group Not a crossword…

© Intercultural Studies Group Competencies come from… Mindless reproduction Filling of academic space Evaluations of output (grading schemes) Suppositions about the market Professional identities Feedback from employer groups Process research comparing novices and professionals

© Intercultural Studies Group Skills and expertise…? Equivalence (literal vs. free) Between texts (products) For an external purpose (Skopos) With translation-specific features ( “ universals ”, from corpora): Simplification Explicitation Adaptation Equalizing Avoidance of TL unique terms

© Intercultural Studies Group Problems with those positions There are shifts everywhere They concern more than literal vs. free Product analysis cannot say why they occur Product analysis cannot distinguish between the translation-specific features. New technologies appear to make the features non- specific.

© Intercultural Studies Group Process studies use Think-Aloud Protocols (TAPs) Keystroke logs Screen recording Eye-tracking Post-performance interviews

© Intercultural Studies Group Screen recording

© Intercultural Studies Group TAPs

© Intercultural Studies Group Translog

© Intercultural Studies Group Eyetracking

© Intercultural Studies Group More experienced translators… 1) use more paraphrase and less literalism as coping strategies (Kussmaul 1995, Lörscher 1991, Jensen 1999)

© Intercultural Studies Group More experienced translators… 2) process larger translation units (Toury 1986, Lörscher 1991, Tirkkonen-Condit 1992)

© Intercultural Studies Group More experienced translators… 3) spend longer reviewing their work at the post- drafting phase but make fewer changes when reviewing (Jensen and Jakobsen 2000, Jakobsen 2002, Englund Dimitrova 2005)

© Intercultural Studies Group More experienced translators… 4) read texts faster and spend proportionally more time looking at the target text than at the source text (Jakobsen and Jensen 2008)

© Intercultural Studies Group More experienced translators… 5) use top-down processing and refer more to the translation purpose (Fraser 1996; Jonasson 1998; Künzli 2001, 2004, Séguinot 1989, Tirkkonen-Condit 1992)

© Intercultural Studies Group More experienced translators… 6) rely on encyclopaedic knowledge as opposed to ST construal (Tirkkonen-Condit 1989)

© Intercultural Studies Group More experienced translators… 7) express more principles and personal theories (Tirkkonen-Condit 1989, 1997, Jääskeläinen 1999)

© Intercultural Studies Group More experienced translators… 8) incorporate the client into the risk-management processes (Künzli 2004)

© Intercultural Studies Group More experienced translators… 9) automatize some complex tasks but also shift between automatized routine tasks and conscious problem-solving (Krings 1988, Jääskeläinen and Tirkkonen-Condit 1991, Englund Dimitrova 2005)

© Intercultural Studies Group More experienced translators… 10) display more realism, confidence and critical attitudes in their decision-making (Künzli 2004)

© Intercultural Studies Group We need more about… speed the capacity to distribute effort in terms of risk the restrained use of external resources (both written and human) the key role of revision/reviewing new technologies.

© Intercultural Studies Group Research on TMs… Tina Paulsen Christensen & Anne Schjoldager Translation-Memory (TM) Research: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? Hermes 44 (2010)

© Intercultural Studies Group Research on TMs… 1) Combination of TM and MT only increases productivity if translators are comfortable with their new role as post-editors of machine-controlled translations. Lange & Bennett 2000

© Intercultural Studies Group Research on TMs… 2) Newly qualified translators and translators with TM experience are more positive about TM technology than others. Dillon & Fraser (2006)

© Intercultural Studies Group Research on TMs… 3) When working with TM, professionals spend relatively more time on revising, compared with what they do during human translation. Dragsted (2004)

© Intercultural Studies Group Research on TMs… 4) The sentence does not constitute a central unit in translators’ cognitive segmentation, though this may be truer for professional translators than for students. Dragsted (2004)

© Intercultural Studies Group Research on TMs… 5) Sub-sentential segmentation gives better recall Colominas 2008

© Intercultural Studies Group Research on TMs… 6) TMs enhance error propagation, and professionals may catch fewer errors than novices. Bowker 2004, Ribas 2007

© Intercultural Studies Group Research on TMs… 7) TMs enhance linguistic interference (punctuation, avoidance of language-specific items) Vilanova 2006

© Intercultural Studies Group Research on TMs… 8) Exact matches exert the least cognitive load on translators, while no matches exert the greatest load, and cognitive load increases as fuzzy-match values decrease. O’Brien 2006

© Intercultural Studies Group Research on TMs… 9) In terms of processing speed, decreasing fuzzy matches mean increasing effort, but dilations increase as match values decrease until the 60-69% match class is reached. Below this match class, decreased pupil dilation is noted. O’Brien 2008

© Intercultural Studies Group Research on TMs… 10) In higher fuzzy-match categories, translators using a more literal TM have higher processing speeds. Yamada 2010

© Intercultural Studies Group Research on TMs… 11) Post-editing MT output requires effort similar to that of a 90% TM fuzzy match. O’Brien 2006

© Intercultural Studies Group Research on TMs… 12) Post-editing MT output is more efficient and gives better quality than TM or translating from scratch. (When MT is wrong, it is really wrong.) Guerberof 2008, 2009

© Intercultural Studies Group Research on TMs… 13) Interfaces that repeat information slow down processing. O’Brien 2009

© Intercultural Studies Group Experiments as good teaching?

© Intercultural Studies Group Summary Good p-values are hard to find in periods of learning and resistance. The firm conclusions are obvious The applications of conclusions are less than obvious. Students can experiment to discover things about themselves.