Translating and Interpreting: An Integrated Cognitive Perspective

Abstract

An SL-TL transfer process must occur in the translators’ or interpreters’ brains when they are performing such bilingual tasks as translation and interpreting. Thus, one might ask what, exactly, happens during this process. Two routes for bilingual processing are debated heatedly in the literature, namely form-based routes and meaning-based routes (e.g., Christoffels and de Groot in Handbook of bilingualism: psycholinguistic approaches. Oxford University Press, 2005; de Groot in Cognitive processes in translation and interpreting. Sage, 1997; de Groot in Tapping and mapping the processes of translation and interpreting: Outlooks on empirical research. John Benjamins, 2000; De Groot in Language and cognition in bilinguals and multilinguals: an introduction. Psychology Press, New York; Hove, 2011; He in Symposium on corpus-assisted research on cognitive processes of translation, 2017; He and Li in Translating/Interpreting as bilingual processing: the theoretical framework, 2015; Isham in Bridging the gap: empirical research in simultaneous interpretation. Benjamins, 1994; Isham and Lane in Sign Lang Studs 85:291–317, 1994; Massaro and Shlesinger in Interpreting 2:13–53, 1997; Paradis in Int J Psycholinguist 10:319–335, 1994; Paradis in A neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2004). In the following section, I specifically present what is known about language recoding from the perspective of bilingual processing. First, I present an integrated perspective on language processing. Second, I further clarify three cognitive processing routes for translation and interpreting, including meaning-based routes, form-based routes, and memory pairing. In the final section, I provide a short summary of this chapter.