Abstract
This volume, edited by Claire Y. Shih (University College London) and Caiwen Wang (University College London), presents a collection of frontier translation and interpreting studies conducted from the cognitive and sociological perspectives. It brings together contributions from renowned researchers in the field of translation and interpreting studies, linguistics, sociology, and electrical and computer engineering from universities in China, Finland, Poland, and the United Kingdom. The aim is to integrate cognitive translation studies with social investigation. The term “cognitive translation studies (CTS)” was first proposed by Halverson (2010) to refer to the cognitive approach to translation studies, though its history extends decades before the advent of the new millennium (p. 349). The objective of this field is to investigate the cognitive activities and behaviours of translators and interpreters and try to explain the nature, internal mechanism, and external factors of translation activities.
The initial studies of CTS were heavily influenced by first-generation cognitive science, which centres on the analogy of the brain as a computer. Studies largely concentrate on investigating the function of “the black box,” focusing on the trinity of stimuli, cognition, and behaviour. In recent years, inspired by second-generation cognitive science, which emphasises cognition as situated, distributed, and embodied (p. 6), CTS has begun to investigate the cultural and social cognition of translators and focus on the interaction between translators and their environment and between the brain and the objective world (Muñoz Martín, 2010).
In examining the latest developments in the field, this book, as the subtitle suggests, places a strong emphasis on the role of affect and its interaction with behaviour and cognition (p. x), which collectively form the triad of social interaction. The stress on the notion of affect inevitably brings out another closely related concept: emotion. The main difference between the two, as editor Shih elaborates in Chapter 1, is that affect is a more holistic concept, encompassing both emotion and mood, whereas emotion is more operational in empirical experiments (p. 12, 14). The studies in this volume tap into both affect and emotion. This volume aims to expand CTS to consider not only affect and emotion but also the triad in social interaction. In the preface, the editors state that:
We believe, as the anonymous reviewers do, too, that this book has identified some salient gaps in the existing literature and attempted to examine the role of affect and cognition in translation and interpreting from a wide range of perspectives. It is a timely book tapping into the entirety and complexity of translation and interpreting as social interaction, with a focus on how affect is interwoven into the fabric of translators’ behaviour and cognition. (p. xii)
The studies presented in this book offer significant theoretical and methodological innovation. The research topics covered include literary translation, legal translation, dialogue interpreting, translator training, human and machine translation, and interpreters’ practice. Many of the empirical studies in this book draw on in-depth interviews with interpreters and translators, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the translational process from the practitioners’ perspective. Other research methods include eye tracking, questionnaires/surveys, retrospective reflection, and case studies. The extensive topic coverage and innovative methods offer readers a comprehensive understanding of the translational process, including the positive and negative effects of affect, the difficulties and challenges affect may pose for practitioners, their understanding of cognition, the transplantation of concepts and human–machine symbiosis, and so on. In the following section, I will provide a brief summary and commentary on each chapter of the volume.
The volume’s 10 chapters are organised into two parts. Part 1 (Chapters 1–4) is dedicated to the topic of affect and is well organised to present both theoretical and empirical studies that encompass both translation and interpreting. Part 2 (Chapters 5–10) comprises six chapters that address behaviour and cognition. Many studies in this section seek to investigate cognition in real social and cultural environments.
In the opening chapter, Claire Shih (Chapter 1) provides a theoretical, conceptual, and methodological foundation for readers to gain a deeper understanding of the following chapters. She presents a detailed account of the development of the triad of social interaction and “unpack[s] the evolvement of translation affect and emotion as a subject of investigation” (p. 1) in translation process research. In addition, she delineates the interconnection and distinction between “affect” and “emotion” in translation studies. She also encourages further investigation into the interaction between affect, cognition, and behaviour to see “how they interact with or even potentially compete with each other” (p. 10).
As an illustrative case to show the relationship between affect, attention, and texts, Chapter 2 by Kirsten Malmkjær investigates the translation of a novel written by a 9-year-old girl that contains grammatical errors typical of children. The translator retained the errors in the translation to preserve the affect that adult readers might experience. By emphasising the role that form, that is the grammatical errors, plays in the experience of affect, this chapter demonstrates an innovative form-based approach to affect studies in literary translation, in addition to the traditional content-based analysis. Malmkjær also emphasises that the translator’s attention to matters of affect is broadly distributed over the whole text and influences individual translation decisions. Thus, she criticises the study of the translation process that uses only “small stretches of text” instead of “whole-source texts.” The researcher’s choice of case is noteworthy and supports a convincing argument.
Chapters 3 and 4 are both empirical studies based on interviews with interpreters. Anu Viljanmaa (Chapter 3) interestingly compares interpreting to sport, as both require “highly trained skills” and “an intense concentration” (p. 40). In this vein, she draws on findings from sports psychology, according to which covert self-talk usually functions as motivational and instructional, and is expressed in first-person and non-first-person forms, to explore the functions and linguistic forms of covert self-talk in dialogue interpreting. By revisiting 22 in-depth interviews of her PhD research, she found that apart from the two functions mentioned above, covert self-talk can also serve a reflective function, and that non-first-person instructional self-talk is likely to be effective in addressing “internal listening filters” (p. 37). The reason why it is categorised as an “affect” study by the editors might be that most of the self-reported self-talk was used by interpreters to regulate their emotions, a type of internal listening filter. This study is significant in an epistemological and pedagogical sense, in that it helps to better understand the function of self-talk and the possibility of developing self-talk skills to better complete interpreting tasks.
The relationship of Chapter 4 to affect is more obvious. Zhiai Liu focuses on the emotional struggles of legal interpreters in the United Kingdom. She first sent survey emails to all 1,508 registered interpreters on the National Register of Public Service Interpreters (NRPSI), a voluntary regulatory body for professional public service interpreters in the United Kingdom, and received 155 responses. She then conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with those who showed willingness to be interviewed in the survey and analysed the data using thematic analysis. Liu finds that ethical stress, vicarious trauma, and lack of support are three major sources of negative emotional impact on legal interpreters. She calls for legal interpreters to be taught prevention and coping strategies to guide them through emotional struggles. This study provides a more granular description of the factors that contribute to the emotional challenges of legal interpreters, which have been less studied in the legal setting compared with the broader public service interpreting (PSI) sector or health care interpreting.
Starting in Chapter 5, the research topics move into the cognition and behaviour domain. Caiwen Wang (Chapter 5) taps into the cognitive processing of omissions in simultaneous interpreting, which is not an underexplored topic, but Wang innovates her research by examining the cognitive factors from the interpreters’ perspective. Based on a project that encourages students to research the topic they are interested in for their MA dissertations, she collects data from seven dissertations on omissions in simultaneous interpreting based on Napier’s (2004) framework, from 2018 to 2021, covering four academic years. In the seven dissertations, student interpreters identified their omission types and described the reasons for each omission. This method facilitates the collection of the interpreters’ self-perceived cognitive processing for each type of omission, and expands the scope of in-depth qualitative data. This study corroborates Napier’s findings and adds that “receptive omissions” can occur due to the interpreter’s own voice in addition to poor sound quality caused by the environment. The study method is instructive for interpreter trainers, because they might be able to pool together the in-depth qualitative data generated by individual students to observe the overall pattern. However, greater transparency regarding ethical issues is merited, such as whether the trainees knew at the beginning of the study that their data would be used for further research and whether they agreed to the use of their data after the study, and so on.
In Chapter 6, Binhua Wang calls for the sociocultural context to be taken into account in the usually process-oriented cognitive interpreting research, as no interpreting event is isolated from the actual situation in which it takes place. In other words, “the exploration into the cognitive process itself should also be ‘situated’” (p. 121) to enhance the ecological validity and the reliability of data analysis. This chapter serves the same function as Chapter 1 for the second part of the volume. Wang’s theoretical discussion provides a thorough analysis of the development of cognitive interpreting studies and elaborates on how interpreting events are shaped by the communicative situation and sociocultural contexts, thus laying a conceptual and theoretical foundation for the studies in the second part.
The eye-tracking research conducted by Monika Płużyczka in Chapter 7 offers good potential to serve as a model for similar studies because of its methodological and theoretical originality. The author sets out to verify and complement current models of the translation process by the method of eye-tracking. Methodologically, she tries to set a framework of eye-tracking parameters including total reading time, dwell time, fixation count, revisits, average fixation, and pupil dilation, and to verify their reliability in indicating cognitive load at various levels, including the text, paragraph, sentence, and word levels. The parameters have rarely been tested so comprehensively at all these levels in previous studies. Theoretically, her experiments prove that reading for sight translation is distinctly different from reading for comprehension and that it also involves long-term memory retrieval, suggested by an originally identified parameter, “special saccadic movement.” This study is quite impressive. As an intensive showcase of almost 10 years (2011–2019) of study and experimentation on sight translation, it demonstrates the possibility of using eye-tracking to identify specific mental processes, in addition to investigating the general distribution of attention in translation studies. The author also turned to neuroscience and biology for answers, which is very illuminating for interdisciplinary approaches to interpreting studies.
From a cognitive-social perspective, Junfeng Zhao and Jie Xue (Chapter 8) explore “how meaning is constructed and perceived under given social conditions” (p. 159) by analysing the legal translation of “right” from English into Chinese “权利.” Drawing on the conceptual integration or blending model proposed by Fauconnier and Turner (1998, 2002), they explore a situation in which intellectual concepts in the source language had no counterpart in the target language, and how and why the translator at the time chose to use a particular character or combine some existing characters to forge a new word, and the social influence the translation brought about. This study illustrates in what ways we can study the construction of meaning in a broader social situation. Its analytical framework is constructive for future studies. However, due to the limited access to historical records, the interpretation is mainly based on contemporaneous essays of the translation rather than on the account of translators or readers. Future studies could try to find more evidence of meaning construction from translators or readers.
Based on a quantitative and qualitative case study, Sui He (Chapter 9) investigates the metaphor translation of a popular science article from cognitive, linguistic, and discursive aspects. Inspired by Liang (2017) and Shuttleworth (2017), this study combines the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and conceptual blending theory (CBT) to analyse metaphor parameters. CMT emphasises the cognitive process of translating metaphors, whereas CBT stresses contextual information. The combination of the two helps to place the analysis of cognition in a social context. The author examines and compares the metaphor translation strategies adopted by two translators for two Chinese versions of the selected article. To avoid the speculative nature of discussing the driving factors behind the strategies, she also interviewed the translators, which forms the discursive part of the research. The study is more qualitatively than quantitatively oriented, as it investigates only one passage and identifies 27 metaphorical expressions. However, as the author asserts, the chapter can “serv[e] as the raw data for further generalisation and comparison” (p. 176).
In the final chapter (Chapter 10), Ming Qian touches on understanding in translation, which depends not only on learning, interpreting, and reasoning about the thing to be understood, but also on affect and situation. In this process, artificial intelligence (AI) is better at deductive, inductive, and selective abductive reasoning, and humans are dominant at creative abductive reasoning. A human–machine symbiosis could enhance understanding. On this theoretical basis, the author uses two representative language models, BERT and GPT-3, to investigate how AI models can help human translators in localisation and culturalisation and how human inputs can help to develop customised machine translation and stylometry. It is quite remarkable that with only a few input examples (an approach known as “few-shot learning”), GPT-3 can learn to generate sentence patterns consistent with simultaneous interpreting techniques. Qian addresses a perennial concern for human translators: What to do with AI? He believes that AI will be a powerful assistant to the “human expert” (p. 215). Such a future is attractive, yes, but if one day AI can do most of the translation work, what will be the future for the “average human translator”? What will be the future of translation education as a whole? These are the questions that translation scholars should ponder today and plan for now.
Overall, this book is very comprehensive in its subject matter, covering interpreting, translation, and the more recent emergence of AI-powered machine translation. For written translation, the book covers both literary and legal translation. The focus of interpreting studies includes both conference and community settings, with processing modes including simultaneous, consecutive, and sight interpreting. The study of AI-powered machine translation also incorporates both written translation and interpreting process. It also provides many creative analytical and methodological frameworks for future studies. On top of these, the studies act in concert to present the theme of this book: putting cognition in social interaction. Although it is mainly concerned with how social factors should be considered from a cognitive perspective, it also sheds light on how social translation researchers can further explore cognitive factors in their work. However, it also has some limitations. As Claire Shih points out, current research on the triad of social interaction largely separates affect from cognition and behaviour (p. 10), which is why the book also organises its chapters into two separate parts, one on affect and the other on cognition and behaviour. However, the result is that the synergies between the three are downplayed. In addition, some studies are still exploratory; a more in-depth discussion is expected. All in all, considering the infant stage of the second-generation-informed CTS, this edited collection has done a wonderful job in bringing together the most advanced studies in the field. It can be placed high on CTS reading lists. It can help novice researchers gain a full picture of CTS by laying a solid theoretical and methodological foundation. For more established scholars, it provides a taste of the latest trends. For practitioners, it can serve as a guide to recognise the importance of affect in their work and how to better harness the power of AI. At a time when translation and interpreting studies are becoming more interdisciplinary and influenced by technological developments, this book is suitable for all readers who want to know how translators and interpreters think, behave, and feel in the real world.
