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Inside The Monitor Model: Processes Of Default And Challenged Translation Production

Year: 2017
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: It has been the subject of debate in the translation process literature whether human translation is a sequential and iterative process of comprehension-transfer- production or whether and to what extent comprehension and production activities may occur in parallel. Tirkkonen-Condit (2005) suggests a “monitor model” according to which translators start in a literal default rendering mode, and a monitor interrupts the default procedure when a problem occurs. This paper proposes an extension of the monitor model in which comprehension and production are processed in parallel by the default procedure. The monitor supervises text production processes, and triggers disintegration of the translation activity into chunks of sequential reading and writing behavior. To investigate this hypothesis, we compare text copying with translation activities under the assumption that text copying represents a typical literal default rendering procedure. Both, translation and text copying, require decoding, retrieval and encoding of textual segments, but translation requires in addition a transfer step into the target language. Comparing reading and writing behaviour obtained in the copying and translation experiments, we observe surprisingly many similarities, which also suggests similarities in the underlying processes. Copyists deviate from the default literal text reproduction into more effortful text understanding, and much of the translators’ behaviour looks like simple text copying. During translation as well as during text copying we observe that translators and copyists resort to sequential reading and writing patterns which seem to be triggered through target text production problems.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1019684
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1554144338
FWCI: 36.98
Cites: 8
Cited by: 86
Related to: 10