Contrastive Linguistics (CL), Translation Studies (TS) and Machine Translation (MT) have common grounds: They all work at the crossroad where two or more languages meet. Despite their inherent relatedness, methodological exchange between the three disciplines is rare. This special issue touches upon areas where the three fields converge. It results directly from a workshop at the 2011 German Association for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics (GSCL) conference in Hamburg where researchers from the three fields presented and discussed their interdisciplinary work. While the studies contained in this volume draw from a wide variety of objectives and methods, and various areas of overlaps between CL, TS and MT are addressed, the volume is by no means exhaustive with regard to this topic. Further cross-fertilisation is not only desirable, but almost mandatory in order to tackle future tasks and endeavours.}

After several paradigm changes and even more turns, after fights about scholarly territories and methodological renewal, after intra- and interdisciplinary discussions, Translation Studies continues to produce a large number of publications dealing with the challenge of defining itself and its object, with the borderlines of both the discipline and the object, with ways of interacting with related (sub)disciplines. This publication gathers contributions from established TS scholars (all former CETRA Chair professors) about the topics that will very probably dominate the near future of the discipline. This is an extended and updated version of a Target special issue with the same title that was published in 2012 (24:1).

This edited volume covers an array of the most relevant topics in translation cognition, taking different approaches and using different research tools. It explores theoretical and methodological issues using case studies and examining their practical and pedagogical implications. It is a valuable resource for translation studies scholars, graduate students and those interested in translation and translation training, enabling them to conceptualize translation cognition, in order to enhance their research methods and designs, manage innovations in their translation training or simply understand their own translation behaviours.

Drawing on work from both eminent and emerging scholars in translation and interpreting studies, this collection offers a critical reflection on current methodological practices in these fields toward strengthening the theoretical and empirical ties between them. Methodological and technological advances have pushed these respective areas of study forward in the last few decades, but advanced tools, such as eye tracking and keystroke logging, and insights from their use have often remained in isolation and not shared across disciplines. This volume explores empirical and theoretical challenges across these areas and the subsequent methodologies implemented to address them and how they might be mutually applied across translation and interpreting studies but also brought together toward a coherent empirical theory of translation and interpreting studies. Organized around three key themes—target-text orientedness, source-text orientedness, and translator/interpreter-orientedness—the book takes stock of both studies of translation and interpreting corpora and processes in an effort to answer such key questions, including: how do written translation and interpreting relate to each other? How do technological advances in these fields shape process and product? What would an empirical theory of translation and interpreting studies look like? Taken together, the collection showcases the possibilities of further dialogue around methodological practices in translation and interpreting studies and will be of interest to students and scholars in these fields.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Cognition provides a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of how translation and cognition relate to each other, discussing the most important issues in the fledgling sub-discipline of Cognitive Translation Studies (CTS), from foundational to applied aspects. With a strong focus on interdisciplinarity, the handbook surveys concepts and methods in neighbouring disciplines that are concerned with cognition and how they relate to translational activity from a cognitive perspective. Looking at different types of cognitive processes, this volume also ventures into emergent areas such as neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive ergonomics and human–computer interaction. With an editors’ introduction and 30 chapters authored by leading scholars in the field of Cognitive Translation Studies, this handbook is the essential reference and resource for students and researchers of translation and cognition and will also be of interest to those working in bilingualism, second-language acquisition and related areas.

Lao She’s Teahouse and Its Two English Translations: Exploring Chinese Drama Translation with Systemic Functional Linguistics provides an in-depth application of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to the study of Chinese drama translation, and theoretically explores the interface between SFL and drama translation. Investigating two English translations of the Chinese drama, Teahouse (茶馆 Cha Guan in Chinese) by Lao She, and translated by John Howard-Gibbon and Ying Ruocheng respectively, Bo Wang and Yuanyi Ma apply Systemic Functional Linguistics to point out the choices that translators have to make in translation. This book is of interest to graduates and researchers of Chinese translation and discourse studies.

The Handbook of Translation and Cognition is a pioneering, state-of-the-art investigation of cognitive approaches to translation and interpreting studies (TIS). Offers timely and cutting-edge coverage of the most important theoretical frameworks and methodological innovations Contains original contributions from a global group of leading researchers from 18 countries Explores topics related to translator and workplace characteristics including machine translation, creativity, ergonomic perspectives, and cognitive effort, and competence, training, and interpreting such as multimodal processing, neurocognitive optimization, process-oriented pedagogies, and conceptual change Maps out future directions for cognition and translation studies, as well as areas in need of more research within this dynamic field

This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to the Translation Process Research Database (TPR-DB), which was compiled by the Centre for Research and Innovation in Translation and Technologies (CRITT). The TPR-DB is a unique resource featuring more than 500 hours of recorded translation process data, augmented with over 200 different rich annotations. Twelve chapters describe the diverse research directions this data can support, including the computational, statistical and psycholinguistic modeling of human translation processes. In the first chapters of this book, the reader is introduced to the CRITT TPR-DB. This is followed by two main parts, the first of which focuses on usability issues and details of implementing interactive machine translation. It also discusses the use of external resources and translator-information interaction. The second part addresses the cognitive and statistical modeling of human translation processes, including co-activation at the lexical, syntactic and discourse levels, translation literality, and various annotation schemata for the data.

The present volume seeks to contribute some studies to the subfield of Empirical Translation Studies and thus aid in extending its reach within the field of translation studies and thus in making our discipline more rigorous and fostering a reproducible research culture. The Translation in Transition conference series, across its editions in Copenhagen (2013), Germersheim (2015) and Ghent (2017), has been a major meeting point for scholars working with these aims in mind, and the conference in Barcelona (2019) has continued this tradition of expanding the sub-field of empirical translation studies to other paradigms within translation studies. This book is a collection of selected papers presented at that fourth Translation in Transition conference, held at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona on 19–20 September 2019.

Companies and organisations are increasingly using machine translation to improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and then edit the machine translated output to create a fluent text that adheres to given text conventions. This procedure is known as post-editing. Translation and post-editing can often be categorised as problem-solving activities. When the translation of a source text unit is not immediately obvious to the translator, or in other words, if there is a hurdle between the source item and the target item, the translation process can be considered problematic. Conversely, if there is no hurdle between the source and target texts, the translation process can be considered a task-solving activity and not a problem-solving activity. This study investigates whether machine translated output influences problem-solving effort in internet research, syntax, and other problem indicators and whether the effort can be linked to expertise. A total of 24 translators (twelve professionals and twelve semi-professionals) produced translations from scratch from English into German, and (monolingually) post-edited machine translation output for this study. The study is part of the CRITT TPR-DB database. The translation and (monolingual) post-editing sessions were recorded with an eye-tracker and a keylogging program. The participants were all given the same six texts (two texts per task). Different approaches were used to identify problematic translation units. First, internet research behaviour was considered as research is a distinct indicator of problematic translation units. Then, the focus was placed on syntactical structures in the MT output that do not adhere to the rules of the target language, as I assumed that they would cause problems in the (monolingual) post-editing tasks that would not occur in the translation from scratch task. Finally, problem indicators were identified via different parameters like Munit, which indicates how often the participants created and modified one translation unit, or the inefficiency (InEff) value of translation units, i.e. the number of produced and deleted tokens divided by the final length of the translation. Finally, the study highlights how these parameters can be used to identify problems in the translation process data using mere keylogging data.