Variability of multiple translations as evidence for cognitive and linguistic factors underlying translator decisions

While research in Translation Studies naturally relies on constructs and methods from various subfields of linguistics, there have been repeated calls for developing a unified theoretical framework and especially for improved interaction with cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics (De Sutter & Lefer, 2020; Halverson & Kotze, 2021). In this context, Halverson’s (2017) revised “gravitational pull” (RGP) model aims to explain translators’ behavior in terms of usage-based factors such as the salience of source and target items and the entrenchment of translation pairs. However, the term “salience” remains notoriously ill-defined in linguistics, tending to conflate distinct phenomena such as attentional prominence, surprisal, and frequency (Boswijk & Coler, 2020; Schmid & Günther, 2016; see also Gilquin, 2008). Furthermore, salience may result not only from lifelong exposure but also from recent priming effects (Hartsuiker et al., 2016; De Sutter et al., 2021). In this talk, I discuss how the components of Halverson’s RGP model may be operationalized. As a test case, I present a study of French translations of English noun sequences (e.g., disaster relief program coordinator). Psycholinguists have long investigated how compound processing may elucidate the structure of the mental lexicon (Libben, 2005; Baayen et al., 2010; Gagné, 2011), and cross-linguistic research can extend this to bilingual cognition. Furthermore, the bare juxtaposition of nouns provides efficient information packing in English but poses specific challenges for translation into French (cf. Lefer & De Clerck, 2021). At the formal level, French tends to use prepositional post-modification, but the accumulation of prepositions can impose a significant cognitive load for longer sequences (e.g., disaster relief program coordinator → coordinateur du programme d'aide en cas de catastrophe). At the semantic level, potentially ambiguous relationships between constituents, left implicit in English, often need to be explicitated in French. I use data from the Multilingual Student Translation corpus (MUST; Granger & Lefer, 2020), consisting of French student translations for English texts specialized in sustainable finance. The resulting access to multiple translators’ interpretations and realizations makes it possible to explore translation variability, i.e., the number of different solutions for a given source instance. This approach, already championed by Malmkjær (1998), remains underexplored to date (but see Castagnoli, 2020). More specifically, I present results from two analyses: (1) a qualitative description of how translation solutions vary at three structural levels (main constituents, linking prepositions, and surface grammar), which can reveal different aspects of how translators interpret source ambiguity; and (2) quantitative multifactorial models of translation variability as a function of sequence length, lexicalization, frequency of use, and structural ambiguity. Thus, while previous RGP studies have explored the under- or overuse of particular lexical or grammatical forms in translation, I propose that studying the variability of multiple translations provides a complementary approach to elucidate the cognitive and linguistic factors underlying translator decisions. References Baayen, R. H., Victor Kuperman & Raymond Bertram. 2010. Frequency effects in compound processing. In Sergio Scalise & Irene Vogel (eds.), Cross-Disciplinary Issues in Compounding, vol. 311, 257–270. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.311.20baa. Boswijk, Vincent & Matt Coler. 2020. What is Salience? Open Linguistics. De Gruyter Open Access 6(1). 713–722. https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2020-0042. Castagnoli, Sara. 2020. Translation choices compared: Investigating variation in a learner translation corpus. In Sylviane Granger & Marie-Aude Lefer (eds.), Translating and comparing languages: Corpus-based insights. Selected proceedings of the Fifth Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies Conference (Corpora and Language in Use - Proceedings), 25–44. Louvain-La-Neuve: Presses Universitaires. 569 De Sutter, Gert, Timothy Colleman & Anne-Sophie Ghyselen. 2021. Intra- and inter-textual syntactic priming in original and translated English. In Gitte Kristiansen, Karlien Franco, Stefano De Pascale, Laura Rosseel & Weiwei Zhang (eds.), Cognitive Sociolinguistics Revisited, 410–421. De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733945. De Sutter, Gert & Marie-Aude Lefer. 2020. On the need for a new research agenda for corpus-based translation studies: A multi-methodological, multifactorial and interdisciplinary approach. Perspectives 28(1). 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2019.1611891. Gagné, Christina L. 2011. Psycholinguistic perspectives. In Rochelle Lieber & Pavol Stekauer (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Compounding, 255–271. Oxford University Press. Gilquin, Gaëtanelle. 2008. What you think ain’t what you get: Highly polysemous verbs in mind and language. In Jean-Rémi Lapaire, Guillaume Desagulier & Jean-Baptiste Guignard (eds.), Du fait grammatical au fait cognitif / From gram to mind: grammar as cognition, 235–255. Pessac: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux. Granger, Sylviane & Marie-Aude Lefer. 2020. The Multilingual Student Translation corpus: a resource for translation teaching and research. Language Resources and Evaluation 54(4). 1183–1199. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-020-09485-6. Halverson, Sandra L. 2017. Gravitational pull in translation: Testing a revised model. In Gert De Sutter, Marie-Aude Lefer & Isabelle Delaere (eds.), Empirical translation studies: New methodological and theoretical traditions (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs, Vol. 300), 9–45. De Gruyter Mouton. http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-7222960. Halverson, Sandra L. & Haidee Kotze. 2021. Sociocognitive constructs in Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS): Do we really need concepts like norms and risk when we have a comprehensive usage-based theory of language? In Sandra L. Halverson & Álvaro Marín García (eds.), Contesting Epistemologies in Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies, 51–79. Routledge. Hartsuiker, Robert J., Saskia Beerts, Maaike Loncke, Timothy Desmet & Sarah Bernolet. 2016. Crosslinguistic structural priming in multilinguals: Further evidence for shared syntax. Journal of Memory and Language 90. 14–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2016.03.003. Lefer, Marie-Aude & Marie De Clerck. 2021. L’apport des corpus intermodaux en lexicologie contrastive : Étude comparative de la traduction écrite et de l’interprétation simultanée des séquences de noms. In Sylvie Hanote & Raluca Nita (eds.), Morphophonologie, lexicologie et langue de spécialité: hommage à Jean-Louis Duchet et à Michel Paillard, 145–162. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Libben, Gary. 2005. Everything is Psycholinguistics: Material and Methodological Considerations in the Study of Compound Processing. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique. Cambridge University Press 50(1–4). 267–283. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000841310000373X. Malmkjaer, Kirsten. 1998. Love thy neighbour: Will parallel corpora endear linguists to translators? Meta : journal des traducteurs / Meta: Translators’ Journal 43(4). 534–541. https://doi.org/10.7202/003545ar. Schmid, Hans-Jörg & Franziska Günther. 2016. Toward a unified socio-cognitive framework for salience in language. Frontiers in Psychology 7. 1110. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01110.

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