## Introduction to the Thematic Section:

## Expertise and Behaviour: Aspects of Cognitive Translation Studies

The focus of this thematic section lies on the behaviour and expertise of translators and interpreters and offers new perspectives into dealing with translation processes. The contributions address cognitive aspects of the translation process such as metalinguistic knowledge, pause patterns, ex -perience, efficacy or creativity. The theoretical examination and experimental investigation of such aspects provide insights into the multi-faceted shapes of the translation process - from liter -ary translation and sign language interpreting to paraphrasing as a form of intralingual translation.

This issue aims to contribute to the conceptual analysis of cognitive processes in translation, and many of the contributions also deal with possible methodological implications and experi -ment with the wide range of potential study designs in a laboratory setting. To establish a common starting point, the authors were encouraged to discuss factors that potentially have an influence on translation behaviour and to study the differences in the cognitive processes of novice and expe -rienced translators during a translation task.

Research on translation processes has so far been carried out above all on an experimental basis, adopting methods such as keystroke and screen logging, eye tracking and think-aloud proto -cols. These approaches are also reflected in this thematic section. In addition, the methodologi -cal spectrum is broadened by retrospective interviews, product analyses and psychological tests. Furthermore, the issue deals with translation processes from a conceptual standpoint and aims to contribute to the theoretical frameworks of Translation Process Research (TPR) from explicitly interdisciplinary perspectives.

Most of the articles in this thematic section were originally presented at the 5 th Translation Pro -cess Research Workshop (TPRW5) in December 2016 at the University of Graz. They offer in -sights into research in the field of TPR by considering a broad spectrum of experimental methods and showing how specific behavioural patterns, such as types of monitoring or personality traits like creativity and expertise, are interlinked. This particular thematic section concentrates there -by on theoretical and experimental studies; the contributions at TPRW5 that deal with workplace and field research on socio-cognitive aspects of translation were published in a Special Issue of the journal Translation Spaces in 2017 (Risku, Rogl & Milosevic 2017).

In the first contribution, ' Metalinguistic Knowledge/Awareness/Ability in Cognitive Translation Studies ', Sandra L. Halverson emphasizes the importance of the further development of theoretical frameworks in cognitive translation studies. Cognitive translation studies have hith -erto concentrated strongly on developing methods for data acquisition and data analysis instead of on concept analysis and theory development. However, methods are merely instruments to an -swer questions, and the discovery of productive questions is driven by theoretically motivated work. As a case in point, Halverson shows that cognitive translation research applies many con -cepts that have long been studied by bi- and multilingualism and second language acquisition re -

* Petra Klimant & Michael Tieber Department of Translation Studies University of Graz Merangasse 70/1 A-8010 Graz petra.klimant@uni-graz.at - michael.tieber@uni-graz.at

* Hanna Risku Centre for Translation Studies University of Vienna Gymnasiumstraße 50 A-1190 Vienna hanna.risku@univie.ac.at

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search. Cognitive translation studies could thus profit from investigations into these neighbour -ing fields. She exemplifies this by discussing concepts that are closely linked to metalinguistic knowledge or knowledge about language. According to Halverson, TPR topics such as translation 'problem' recognition, different forms of 'control' of the translation process and the implications of translation 'strategies' all presume metalinguistic abilities - not just apparent ones like 'moni -toring' or 'consciousness' (the latter, she states, is still relatively underexposed in TPR). She em -phasizes that it is thus time to critically investigate the common grounds of the fields, deploying, for example, the usage-based cognitive linguistic view of second language acquisition and recent situated cognition models in translation studies as promising theoretical frameworks that combine socio-cognitive theories of language.

In the following contribution, 'Fascinatin' Rhythm - and Pauses in Translators' Cognitive Processes' , Ricardo Muñoz Martín and Celia Martín de León investigate a way to test the hypothesis of a 'Monitor Model'. The Monitor Model hypothesis presumes that the translator switches between a 'shallow processing' and a 'problem-solving' mode to monitor the transla -tion. In a key-stroke logging experiment with translation students producing Spanish translations of English source texts, Muñoz and Martín establish three individualized pause categories, as -suming that a certain pause type would be connected to changes in the processing mode. How -ever, their findings did not show evidence for problem-solving thresholds, thus questioning the Monitor Model.

In the third paper entitled 'Exploring Cognitive Aspects of Competence in Sign Language Interpreting of Dialogues: First Impressions' , Elisabet Tiselius explores process differences be -tween novice and experienced sign language interpreters. As a starting point, Tiselius argues that dialogue interpreters for both signed and non-signed languages share many of the same cognitive processes and face similar challenges like monitoring participants' contributions and dealing with ethical issues of asymmetric positions of power. She then goes on to report on an experiment that revealed differences in the way novice and experienced Swedish sign language interpreters deal with the same dialogue setting. After having interpreted a scripted role play, members of both groups took part in a retrospective analysis of their own interpreting acts. The data set, which also included an analysis of the interpreting product, indicated that experienced and inexperienced in -terpreters carry out different processes to handle, for example, turn taking, monitoring and termi -nology.

In the next contribution, 'Testing Indicators of Translation Expertise in an Intralingual Task' , Boguslawa Whyatt sheds  light  on  the  concept  of  expertise  in  two  different  tasks:  translating and writing. She studies the indicators in translation expertise proposed by Massey/Ehrensberg -er-Dow (2014) - the use of external resources, pauses and text production speed - in professional translators and translation/language students translating from English into Polish, and also tests the occurrence of these indicators in a paraphrasing task. Whyatt extends the list of potential indi -cators of translation expertise by also analysing task duration and translation quality. The results confirm the indicators for translation expertise (i.e. less use of external resources, shorter prob -lem-solving pauses, faster text production and high quality target texts) in both tasks and lead to the suggestion that this concept of expertise could be adopted not only in a bilingual but also in an intralingual task context.

The fifth paper by Ana Rojo and Purificación Meseguer entitled 'Creativity and Translation Quality: Opposing Enemies or Friendly Allies?' represents another experimental approach to studying translation expertise. Rojo and Meseguer set out to identify correlations between lev -els of creativity and translation performance, e.g. in terms of accuracy and innovative solutions. They investigate the connection between creativity and translation expertise by hypothesising that a creative personality may have positive effects on the translation process. In an experiment, 40 professional translators took a validated creativity personality test before translating a short text.

The thematic section on expertise and behaviour concludes with a theoretical contribution. In his position paper, 'Levels of Explanation and Translation Expertise' , Gregory M. Shreve re- flects on the explanation frameworks used in cognitive translation studies to describe translation expertise. He proposes that we have traditionally concentrated on the middle level of description by studying how high-level tasks such as text comprehension in translation are enabled by their lower-level process constituents like memory retrieval, lexical access and selection. To broad -en the view on translation expertise, he adopts the proposal by Marr (1982) to take an explicitly levelled approach to explaining complex cognitive activities. He suggests that we connect the in -termediate 'algorithmic/representational' constructs with 'implementational' constructs on the physical, neural level. Although each investigation will have to be confined to a specific level, Shreve paints a picture of cognitive translation studies as a whole, including studies from high, coarse-grained levels of cognitive explanation (translation as embedded and situated in a physi -cal, social and cultural environment) to low, fine-grained levels of cognitive explanation (neural processes and structures).

Altogether, the contributions in this section exemplify the directions in which the TPR field has evolved since the first theoretical and think-aloud studies of the 1980s. Looking back at the development of TPR, we can see how its focus has expanded from the indicators of problem solv -ing and competences to other forms of cognitive processes like uncertainty management and high mental loads and to the topic of expertise. TPR is moving forward by drawing on interdiscipli -nary conceptual work, methodological innovations and the development of explicit levels of in -vestigation - from social and cognitive to neural. We hope that the papers will inspire other col -leagues and serve as an incentive for further research - theoretical and empirical, in the lab and in the field, qualitative and quantitative - on all the relevant levels of investigation.

## References

Marr, David 1982: Vision . San Francisco: Freeman.

- Massey, Gary/Ehrensberger-Dow, Maureen 2014: Looking Beyond Text: The Usefulness of Translation Process Data. In Engberg, Jan/Heine, Carmen/Knorr, Dagmar (eds.), Methods in Writing Process Research .  Bern: Peter Lang, 81-98.
- Risku, Hanna/Rogl, Regina/Milosevic, Jelena (eds.) 2017: Translation Practice in the Field: Current Research on So -cio-Cognitive Processes. Special Issue of Translation Spaces 6:1.