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Cognitive space: Exploring the situational interface
Edited by Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow and Birgitta Englund Dimitrova
[Translation Spaces 5:1] 2016
► pp. 145–161

Processes of what models?

On the cognitive indivisibility of translation acts and events

| PETRA Research Group, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

In a recent article, Chesterman (2013) elaborates on Toury’s (2012) distinction between ‘translation acts’ (cognitive process) and ‘translation events’ (sociological process), and adds a third, superordinate level of ‘translation practices’ (cultural, historical, anthropological). Such successively nested models seem intuitively correct when applied to categorizing different approaches within translation studies. However, when used within cognitive and psycholinguistic approaches, such categories are found to lead to flawed reasoning. When Chesterman’s proposal is considered from perspectives such as the level of abstraction and the dynamicity of the models, many examples provided as illustration turn out to be misleading. The bulk of such errors points to an implicit notion of cognition which is contested by a growing number of researchers within translation process research: a view of thought as an internal, neutral, and logical brain process, mainly focused on problem-solving.

Keywords: cognitivism, translation process research, situated cognition, translation event, translation act, social cognition
Published online: 20 October 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.5.1.08mun
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