translation

This project has lead to the creation of TREC (Translation, Research, Empiricism, Cognition), a network of Translation scholars and Research groups united by their joint interest in Empiricism and the rigorous investigation of the human translation process, especially with respect to Cognition. The thematic network goals are:

1. To promote the exchange and transference of knowledge about empirical and experimental research in translation process, translation competence and translation competence acquisition.

2. To foster the cooperation among different research groups working on empirical and experimental research in translation.

3. To optimize the use of methodological resources as well as technological tools to collect data for research in translation.

4. To work together towards the building of the foundations of future empirical and experimental research projects in translation.

A website and a database on empirical and experimental research in written translation have been created. This thematic network is currently formed by 13 research groups who are carrying out empirical and experimental research in translation, with the participation of 49 researchers from 17 universities, from 10 different countries distributed throughout Europe and the Americas.

Like many other knowledge workers, translators spend much of their day making decisions at computers. If information flow or concentration is impaired due to non-optimal ergonomics, the efficiency of the process and the quality of the final product can suffer. This interdisciplinary project combines perspectives from translation studies, occupational health, usability testing, and language technology to investigate ergonomic issues at the translation workplace.

The translation processes of students, novices, and experienced professionals are captured at different points in their careers. The mixed method approach of the project combines observation of the workplace, interviews, questionnaires, computer logging, screenshot recordings, eye-tracking, and retrospective verbalizations. This allows comparisons to be made across different types of processes (e.g. translation with and without translation memory resources, revision and editing, translation in the workplace and in controlled settings), language combinations (e.g. English, French, or Italian into or out of German), and directions (e.g. English-German and German-English) within individuals over time and across tasks and between groups of translators.