Metonymic language use as a student translation problem

The concept of translation problem plays an essential role in translation process and product studies and encompasses a wide variety of kinds of problems, including those of a linguistic nature. While Translation Studies seems to agree that a linguistic competence module is part of a translator’s required competences, it is not clear to what extent cross-linguistic differences actually pose problems to most translation students and therefore need a place in the training curriculum. Our study looks into the extent to which the translation of a linguistic construction that differs cross-linguistically raises translation process problems. Translators who are not aware of the restrictions (or translation tools that have not integrated the cross-linguistic differences) may, indeed, produce a translation that does not conform to the target language idiom. And translators who are aware of the restrictions will need to look for alternative formulations that are suited to the translation situation, and decide on the best translation from a range of possibilities. This chapter will discuss the methods applied in an investigation of a novel kind, which combines approaches from linguistics, psycholinguistics and Translation Studies.