Skip to main content

Translation in the Brain: Preliminary Thoughts About a Brain-Imaging Study to Investigate Psychological Processes Involved in Translation

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Researching Cognitive Processes of Translation

Abstract

Over the past years, the understanding of cognitive processes that underpin the task of translation have been an unceasing goal in the field of translation process research.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 89.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    The Inhibitory Control (IC) model proposes the notion of a functional control circuit with three basic loci of control: an executive locus (the supervisory attentional system used for establishing and maintaining goals), a locus at the level of language task, and a locus within the bilingual lexico-semantic system itself. According to the IC model, in order to speak in one language rather than another or to translate between languages, individuals establish language task schemas. These are effectively action schemas in the domain of language and link input to, and output from, the bilingual lexico-semantic system to responses. (see Green 1998a, b for more information on this topic).

  2. 2.

    Sentence size rages form 49 to 55 characters (W = 0,973; p = 0,64).

  3. 3.

    Sentence size ranges from 109 to 117 characters (W = 0,96; p = 0,31).

References

  • Alves, F. (2010). Explicitness and explicitation in translation: A relevance-theoretic approach. In J. C. Costa & F. José Rauen (Eds.), Topics on relevance theory (pp. 77–97). Porto Alegre: ediPUCRS.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alves, F., & Vale, D. (2009). Probing the unit of translation in time: Aspects of the design and development of a web application for storing, annotating, and querying translation process data. Across Languages and Cultures, 10(2), 251–273.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Alves, F., Pagano, A., & da Silva, I. (2009). A new window on translators’ cognitive activity: Methodological issues in the combined use of eye tracking, key logging and retrospective protocols. In I. Mees, F. Alves, & S. Göpferich (Eds.), Methodology, technology and innovation in translation process research: a tribbut tob Arnt Lykke Jakobsen (pp. 267–291). Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alves, F., Gonçalves, J. L., & Szpak, K. S. (2012). Identifying instances of processing effort in translation through heat maps: An eye-tracking study using multiple input sources. In M. Carl, P. Bhattacharyya, & K. K. Choudhary (Eds.), Proceedings of the first workshop on eye tracking and natural language processing (pp. 5–20).

    Google Scholar 

  • Amodio, D. M., & Frith, C. D. (2006). Meeting of minds: The medial frontal cortex and social cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7(4), 268–277.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Annoni, J. M., Lee-Jahnke, H., & Sturm, A. (2012). Neurocognitive aspects of translation. Meta, 57(1), 96–107.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Arora, A., Weiss, B., Schurz, M., Aichhom, M., Wieshofer, R. C., & Perner, J. (2015). Left inferior-parietal love activity in perspective tasks: Identity statements. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9(360), 1–17.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition, 21(1), 37–46.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bašnáková, J., Weber, K., Petersson, K. M., van Berkum, J., & Hagoort, P. (2013). Beyond the language given: The neural correlates of inferring speaker meaning. Cerebral Cortex, 24(10), 2572–2578.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bell, R. T. (1991). Translation and translating: Theory and practice. London: Longman.

    Google Scholar 

  • Binder, J. R., & Desai, R. H. (2011). The neurobiology of semantic memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(11), 526–537.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blakemore, S. J., & Frith, U. (2004). How does the brain deal with the social world? Neuroreport, 15(1), 119–128.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carl, M., & Dragsted, B. (2012). Inside the monitor model: Processes of default and challenged translation production. Translation: Computation, Corpora, Cognition. Special Issue on the Crossroads Between Contrastive Linguistics, Translation Studies and Machine Translation, 2(1), 127–145.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carl, M., & Kay, M. (2011). Gazing and typing activities during translation: A comparative study of translation units of professional and student translators. Meta, 56(4), 952–975.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carston, R. (2000). Explicature and semantics. In S. Davis & B. Gillon (Eds.), Semantics: A reader (pp. 817–845). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carston, R. (2004). Relevance theory and the saying/implicating distinction. In L. Horn & G. Ward (Eds.), The handbook of pragmatics (pp. 633–656). Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dalgleish, T. (2004). The emotional brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5(7), 583–589.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ericsson, K. A., & Simon, H. A. (1984). Protocol analysis: Verbal reports as data. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fan, Y., Duncan, N. W., de Greck, M., & Northoff, G. (2011). Is there a core neural network in empathy? An fMRI based quantitative meta-analysis. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(3), 903–911.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher, H. L., & Frith, C. D. (2003). Functional imaging of “theory of mind”. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(2), 77–83.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gerloff, P. A. (1988). From French to English: A look at the translation process in students, bilinguals, and professional translators. PhD thesis. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Green, D. (1998a). Mental control of bilingual lexico-semantic system. Bilingualism, 1, 67–81.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Green, D. (1998b). Schemas, tags and inhibition. Reply to commentators. Bilingualism, 1, 100–104.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grice, H. (1957). Meaning. Philosophical Review, 66(3), 377–388.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gutt, E. A. (2000). Translation and relevance. In Cognition and context (2nd ed.). Manchester: St. Jerome.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gutt, E. A. (2005). Challenges of metarepresentation to translation competence. In P. A. Schmitt & G. Wotjak (Eds.), Translationskompetenz. Tagungsberichte der LICTRA (Leipzig International conference on translation studies) (pp. 77–89). Stauffenberg: Tübingen.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gutt, E. A. (2006). Teoria da Relevância e Tradução: e busca de um novo realismopara a tradução da Bíblia. In F. Alves & J. L. Gonçalves (Eds.), Relevância em Tradução: perspectivas teóricas e aplicadas (pp. 35–55). Belo Horizonte: Faculdade de Letras UFMG.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hirsch, E. D. (1987). Cultural literacy: What every American needs to know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hurtado Albir, A., Alves, F., Englund Dimitrova, B., & Lacruz, I. (2015). A retrospective and prospective view of translation research from an empirical, experimental, and cognitive perspective: The TREC network. Translation & Interpreting, 7(1), 5–21.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hvelplund, K. T. (2011). Allocation of cognitive resources in translation: An eye-tracking and key-logging study. PhD thesis. Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jääskeläinen, R. (1987). What happens in a translation process: Think-aloud protocols of translation. Unpublished MA thesis. University of Joensuu, Savolinna.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jakobsen, A. L., & Jensen, K. T. H. (2008). Eye movement behaviour across four different types of reading task. In S. Gopferich, A. L. Jakobsen, & I. M. Mees (Eds.), Looking at eyes: Eye-tracking studies of reading and translation processing (pp. 103–124). Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jakobsen, A. L., & Schou, L. (1999). Translog documentation Version 1.0. In G. Hansen (Ed.), Probing the process of translation: Methods and results (pp. 1–36). Copenhagen: Samfundislitteratur.

    Google Scholar 

  • Klein, D., Milner, B., Zatorre, R. J., Meyer, E., & Evans, A. C. (1995). The neural substrates underlying word generation: A bilingual functional-imaging study. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science for the United States of America, 92(7), 2899–2903.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Krings, H. P. (1986). Translation problems and translation strategies of advanced German learners of French (L2). In J. House & S. Blum-Kulka (Eds.), Interlingual and intercultural communication (pp. 263–276). Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leslie, A. M. (1987). Pretense and representation: The origins of “theory of mind”. Psychological Review, 94(4), 412–426.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Leslie, A. M. (2000). “Theory of mind” as a mechanism of selective attention. In M. S. Gazzaniga & B. Emilio (Eds.), The new cognitive neurosciences (pp. 1235–1247). Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leslie, A. M., & Polizzi, P. (1998). Inhibitory processing in the false belief task: Two conjectures. Developmental Science, 1(2), 247–258.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Leslie, A. M., & Thaiss, L. (1992). Domain specificity in conceptual development: Neuropsychological evidence from autism. Cognition, 43(3), 225–251.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Leslie, A. M., Friedman, O., & German, T. P. (2004). Core mechanisms in ‘theory of mind’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(12), 528–533.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lörscher, W. (1991). Translation performance, translation process, and translation strategies: A psycholinguistic investigation. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mason, R. A., & Just, M. A. (2009). The role of the theory-of-mind cortical network in the comprehension of narratives. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(1), 157–174.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell, J. P. (2007). Activity in right temporo-parietal junction is not selective for theory-of-mind. Cerebral Cortex, 18(2), 262–271.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell, J. P., Macrae, C. N., & Banaji, M. R. (2006). Dissociable medial prefrontal contributions to judgments of similar and dissimilar others. Neuron, 50(4), 655–663.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • O’Brien, S. (2006). Pauses as indicators of cognitive effort in post-editing machine translation output. Across Languages and Cultures, 7(1), 1–21.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • PACTE. (2011). Results of the validation of the PACTE translation competence model: Translation project and dynamic translation index. In S. O’Brien (Ed.), Cognitive exploration of translation (pp. 30–53). London: Bloomsbury.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pavlović, N., & Jensen, K. (2009). Eye tracking translation directionality. In A. Pym & A. Perekrestenko (Eds.), Translation research projects 2 (pp. 93–109). Tarragona: Intercultural Studies Group.

    Google Scholar 

  • Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1(4), 515–526.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Price, C. J., Green, D. W., & Von Studnitz, R. (1999). A functional imaging study of translation and language switching. Brain, 122(12), 2221–2235.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Roth, D., & Leslie, A. M. (1998). Solving belief problems: Toward a task analysis. Cognition, 66(1), 1–31.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Saxe, R., & Kanwisher, N. (2003). People thinking about thinking people: The role of the temporo-parietal junction in “theory of mind”. Neuroimage, 19(4), 1835–1842.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scholl, B. J., & Leslie, A. M. (1999). Modularity, development and ‘theory of mind’. Mind & Language, 14(1), 131–153.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Séguinot, C. (1989). Understanding why translators make mistakes. TTR, 2(2), 73–81.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sperber, D. (1994). Understanding verbal understanding. In J. Khalfa (Ed.), What is intelligence (pp. 179–198). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tymoczko, M. (2005). Trajectories of research in translation studies. Meta, 50(4), 1082–1097.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, D. (2000). Metarepresentation in linguistic communication. In D. Sperber (Ed.), Metarepresentations: A multidisciplinary perspective (pp. 411–448). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, D. (2005). New directions for research on pragmatics and modularity. Lingua, 115, 1129–1146.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgement

Research funded by CNPq, the Brazilian Research Council, grant n° 308892/2015-1, and FAPEMIG, the Agency for Research Support of the State of Minas Gerais, grant n° PPM-00696-16.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fabio Alves .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Alves, F., Szpak, K.S., Buchweitz, A. (2019). Translation in the Brain: Preliminary Thoughts About a Brain-Imaging Study to Investigate Psychological Processes Involved in Translation. In: Li, D., Lei, V., He, Y. (eds) Researching Cognitive Processes of Translation. New Frontiers in Translation Studies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1984-6_6

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1984-6_6

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-13-1983-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-13-1984-6

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics