How Do Translation Students’ Cognitive Efforts Vary? - An Answer in Consideration of Pauses

Mehmet Yildiz

doi:10.7176/jep/11-2-05

Abstract

Note: This paper has been derived from the author’s doctoral dissertation, which is titled “Assessment of Translation Trainees' Translation Competencies within the Scope of Specialized Translation” and was financially supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (Fellowship#: 1059B141401063). Abstract Cognitive dynamics of translators as a translational phenomenon have drawn much scholarly attention over the last three decades and this non-physical phenomenon has been investigated in view of textual and non-textual observable data. The present study operationalizes pauses as observable non-textual data to investigate cognitive effort that translation students invest in as they translate. To this end, the author utilized a keylogger – Translog II – to obtain pause-related data, i.e. number of pauses and length of pauses. The sample consists of 78 first-, second-, third-, and fourth-year translation students studying in the Department of Translation and Interpreting in English at Istanbul University. The data were collected from the participants in two sessions, October 2013 and May 2014, in which they were invited to translate two excerpts from two different user’s manuals. The results revealed that translation students tend to invest not only higher levels of but also varying degrees of cognitive efforts during translation as they are more exposed to translation training. Keywords: Number of pauses, Length of pauses, Cognitive effort, Translation students, Keylogging, DOI : 10.7176/JEP/11-2-05 Publication date: January 31 st 2020

Highlights

Translation process is not an uninterrupted flow of textual production rather a behavioral potpourri of several activities, such as reading, understanding, writing/typing, deleting, revising, and pausing with underlying cognitive processes
Schilperoord (1996) states that textual production consists of “successive production increments”, each of which “corresponds with its own mental structure”. He believes that each increment is produced as a result of an “attention state” (1996: 9), which suggests that the end of an increment should mark the end of the attention state and a subsequent production increment should point to the beginning of a new attention state
The study is concerned with describing the cognitive efforts that Turkish translation students invest as they translate in consideration of the numbers and lengths of pauses

Summary

Introduction

Translation process is not an uninterrupted flow of textual production rather a behavioral potpourri of several activities, such as reading, understanding, writing/typing, deleting, revising, and pausing with underlying cognitive processes. The components in this non-exhaustive list result either in or from decision-making. Micro-level decisions supposedly made in congruence with macro-level decisions are products of decisions between at least two choices, a process whereby a translational choice is singled out over the other(s). This mental-level processing leads to a material-level production (Schilperoord, 1996: 8). According to Schilperoord (1996), what come into play between two subsequent increments, and two mental structures, are pauses, which “are behavioural[sic] reflections of the cognitive processes involved in changing attentional stages” (p. 9)

Methods

Results

Conclusion