Cognitive Explorations of Translation

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Trainers of translators tend to know what a good translation is. This knowledge results from their teaching experience and their knowledge of the professional market, but not always from empirical research. The contributors to this volume help to change that state of affairs: they make use of various methods (think aloud protocols, keylogging, eyetracking and cued retrospection) and their results are of great interest to those in practical and theoretical translation studies. This collective volume reflects recent trends in cognitive translation process research. Some articles deal primarily with theoretical and methodological issues; others show applications of introspective methods and software like keystroke-logging, screen recording, eye-tracking, pupillometrics and EEG. Several exploratory studies using various method combinations are reported and discussed. Aspects considered include translation competence development, uncertainty management, the cognitive load under different reading modalities or when translating from and into L1, eye-tracking of metaphor translation, distribution of attention between source text and target text, and limits on cognitive processing. In some of the studies, the cognitive effort involved in translating is investigated in groups with different degrees of expertise; processes of students or novice translators are compared with the processes of professional translators - with the primary aim of improving translation competence acquisition.