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Article published In:
Translation and Interpreting Studies
Vol. 12:3 (2017) ► pp.469–488

Asymmetry and automaticity in translation

| University of Łódź

This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to integrate insights from cognitive psychology and Cognitive Linguistics into translational inquiry by modeling the translator’s operations as alternating between System 1 and System 2 thinking. We analyze trainee output to investigate translatorial decision-making in scenarios employing instances of basic cross-linguistic asymmetry in the partitioning of conceptual material. The objective is to better understand the role that automaticity plays in those contexts: how pronounced it is, how it influences translation output, and to what extent the skill of monitoring it can be regarded a component of translation competence. The study also tests, in one condition, whether the translator trainer can induce System 2 processing in trainees by issuing extra pre-task instruction, thereby helping optimize their performance.

Keywords: dual process theories, decision-making, translation competence, language and cognition, processing in translation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Dual processing
  • 3.Processing in translation
    • 3.1Investigating the translation process
    • 3.2Automaticity in translation processing
      • 3.2.1Automaticity and translation competence
  • 4.Asymmetric interlingual structuring of content
  • 5.The study
    • 5.1Participants and materials
    • 5.2Data analysis
      • 5.2.1Sample 1
      • 5.2.2Sample 2
      • 5.2.3Sample 3
      • 5.2.4Sample 4
  • 6.General discussion
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.12.3.06dec
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