Abstract
The present chapter compares and evaluates the merits of three recent studies dealing with the cognitive processes of structuring information in translations. The studies differ in taking a syntactic, a functional and a conceptual approach respectively. Correlation between structuring operations in translation and cognitive effort is found to be higher when a conceptual relevance-theoretic approach is taken, yet the results are somewhat inconclusive due to weaknesses in the operationalization of the relevance theoretic concept of procedural information. The syntactic parsing approach would also be improved by a more fine grained analysis. Functional categories as well as reallocation measures are found to be relevant for a more precise understanding of the effort related to structuring operations in translation.
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Notes
- 1.
This finding is based on the systematic analysis of a bidirectional English-Norwegian corpus of 68,000 words, including fiction and legal texts comprising about 4500 clause strings: 55.2Â % of the data are classified as only pragmatically equivalent to their source strings (Thunes 2011: 257).
- 2.
In the present paper I concentrate on the reading time measures only.
- 3.
This does not mean, of course, that the translator does not go back to reading the source text while editing. The TPR-DB shows that often ST reading and TT writing occur concurrently (see Chap. 9).
- 4.
- 5.
This does not imply that syntactic priming cannot also affect lexical choice (see Chap. 10 for the study on syntactic priming).
- 6.
The studies from which the data was taken: SG12 for German, KTHJ08 for Danish, and BML12 for Spanish, for a description of these studies, see Chap. 2.
- 7.
P09 has misunderstood the segment, so her solution is irrelevant for my purpose here.
- 8.
An analogous translation, in Doherty’s view, is one which retains high similarity of form at every level. Grammatically acceptable analogous translations are seen as the starting point for the translator’s search for an optimal translation (Doherty 2002: 166).
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Behrens, B. (2016). The Task of Structuring Information in Translation. In: Carl, M., Bangalore, S., Schaeffer, M. (eds) New Directions in Empirical Translation Process Research. New Frontiers in Translation Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20358-4_12
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