Cognitive translation & interpreting studies

Cognitive Science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind, its abilities (e.g., attention, memory) and its processes (e.g., learning, information processing, decision making). Psycholinguistics is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors in the perception, acquisition, comprehension and production of language and speech. Cognitive and psycholinguistic approaches to translation and interpreting focus on the ways people translate and interpret oral, written and signed languages, in order to improve production, quality, professional training and user education. Neighboring research strands also focus on other participants in all sorts of multilectal communicative events, or on translators and interpreters as trained bilinguals. All these strands are collectively known as cognitive translation & interpreting studies. In the fuzzy borders of this realm we can also find research endeavors using translation and interpreting tasks as a way to study the brain and mind, which often may be consdiered part of our interests, such as the study of the mental lexicon. Cognitive translation & interpreting studies lie at the heart of translation and interpreting studies because they were amongst the first areas to develop in the university discipline that started to become institutionalized after WWII. Several periods or stages may be distinguished in these approaches that are related with the evolution of both translation and interpreting studies and cognitive science. The first steps were made by psycholinguists who worked on simultaneous interpreting and by linguists and translatologists working on machine translation. With the development of cognitive science and a transitory debacle of machien translation, the Leipzig School and the Paris School became the first two major approaches within translation and interpreting studies to focus on human cognition. A psycholinguistic period would follow where tools, such as think-aloud techniques and constructs, such as problem solving, were borrowed from cognitive and experimental psychology, and from generative linguistics (e.g., competence). In the 1990s, cognitive and psycholinguistic approaches began to gather momentum in interpreting research, while in translation they accommodated to the new realities of a market that became computerized very quickly. There followed a renewal in data-collection tools, that were enlarged to include keylogging, eyetracking, EEG, ERPs, fMRI, electrophysiological data and corpus analysis. The second cognitive revolution in the 1990s would also affect the very conception of thinking and of mind, that was reembodied and also reembedded into its environment. This lead to new approaches to develop, away from the classical information-processing paradigm, which enlarged the object of study to other agents in the communicative events, such as the receptors of translations, and also to their networks, hence the new, wider name of cognitive translation & interpreting studies.