PLM2015 Thematic session: Language processing in translation

Convener: Bogusława Whyatt (Faculty Of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań)

Special guest: Arnt Lykke Jakobsen  (Centre for Research and Innovation in Translation and Translation Technology, Copenhagen Business School)

This session is devoted to language/information processing in translation where translation is understood in Jakobson’s (1959) broad sense as the interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic transfer of meaning from one form into another. Although the role of linguistic mediation has been recognised in todays’ multilingual and multicultural communities, unravelling the computational procedures that enable the human mind to transfer meaning from one form into another are still a challenge for Translation Process Research (TPR) (Whyatt et al. 2014). TPR has become a vibrant area of investigation and because of the new research methods, including key-logging (Jakobsen 2005), screen capture and eye-tracking (Saldanha & O’Brien 2014) it has demonstrated the cognitive complexity of meaning transfer not only in qualitative but also in quantitative empirical studies (Carl & Dragsted 2012). We know that translators read a text for translation in a different way than other readers (Jakobsen & Jensen 2008; Alves et al. 2011), we know that experience in translation has an impact on how translators handle texts and we know that IT has changed the work of translators who are also asked to post-edit computer generated output (Angelone et al. 2012). In this thematic/workshop session we welcome papers which report on empirical studies devoted to language processing aimed at linguistic mediation. We also invite speakers with more theoretical approaches, and especially those with a background in cognitive linguistics (Rojo & Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2013) who are able to provide arguments that TPR is able to contribute to an increased understanding of linguistic concepts.

Submission deadline for this session: 22 March 2015.

Selected proceedings will be published in a special issue of PSiCL (Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics) which is an impact factor journal listed by the Thomson Reuters Master Journal List and published by the renowned scientific publisher De Gruyter.

Sample references:

Alves, Fabio, Adriana Pagano and Igor da Silva. 2011.“Towards an investigation of reading modalities in/for translation: An exploratory study using eye-tracking data.” In: S. O’Brien (ed.). Cognitive explorations of translation, 175-192. London: Continuum.

Angelone, Erik, Lacruz, Isabel, and Gregory M. Shreve. 2012. “Average pause ratio as an indicator of cognitive effort in post-editing: A case study”, in O’Brien, Sharon, Simard, Michael and Lucia Specia (eds.). 2012. Proceedings of the AMTA 2012 Workshop on Post-Editing Technology and Practice (WTP 2012). (url: http://amta2012.amtaweb.org/AMTA2012Files/html/2/2_paper.pdf) (date of access: 5 Dec 2014).

Carl, Michael, and Barbara Dragsted. 2012. “Inside the Monitor Model: Processes of default and challenged translation production.” Translation: Computation, Corpora, Cognition 2 (1): 127–45.

Jakobsen, Arnt Lykke. 2005. “Investigating expert translators’ processing knowledge.” In Knowledge Systems and Translation, ed. by Helle V. Dam, Jan Engberg, and Heidrun Gerzymisch-Arbogast, 173–89. Berlin, Boston: Muton de Gruyter.

Jakobsen, Arnt L. and Kristian T.H. Jensen. 2008.”Eye movement behaviour across four different types of reading task”. In: S. Göpferich, A.L. Jakobsen & I.M. Mees, eds. Looking at eyes: Eye-tracking studies of reading and translation processing, 103-124. Copenhagen Studies in Language 36.

Jakobson, Roman. 1959. “On linguistic aspects of translation.” In On Translation, ed. by Reuben Arthur Brower, 232–39. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press.

Rojo, Ana and Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano. 2013. “Cognitive Cognitive Linguistics and Translation Studies: Past, present and future” In: A. Rojo & I. Ibarretxe-Antuñano eds. Cognitive Linguistics and Translation, 3-30. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Saldanha, Gabriela, and Sharon O’Brien. 2014. Research Methodologies in Translation Studies. New York: Routledge.

Whyatt, Boguslawa, Marta Kajzer-Wietrzny, and Katarzyna Stachowiak. 2014. [accepted for publication]. “A comparative analysis of decision making in interlingual and intralingual translation. Combining process and product.” In: A. L. Jakobsen. (ed.) Translation in Transition, Benjamins Translation Library. Benjamins.