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Article published In: Target
Vol. 36:2 (2024) ► pp.159–183

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Situated minds and distributed systems in translation

Exploring the conceptual and empirical implications

ORCiD logo with link | Stockholm University
ORCiD logo with link | University of Vienna
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Stockholm University.

Published online: 23 April 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/target.22172.san
Abstract
This article sheds light on two different perspectives on the boundaries of the cognitive system and the consequences of their adoption for Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies (CTIS). Both are represented by different approaches within the cognitive scientific cluster of approaches referred to as situated or 4EA (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, and affective) cognition. The first, the person-centred perspective, takes individuals as a starting point and describes their interactions with their social and material surroundings. The second, the distributed, extended perspective, takes the joint activity of different situated actors and material artefacts as its starting point and depicts this socio-cognitive unit as the object of analysis. With this article, we do not seek to advocate the use of one over the other. Rather, we attempt to offer a coherent interpretation of how the cognitive process of translation can be studied and interpreted as a situated activity either from the perspective of individual actors or from a larger, distributed, and extended angle that considers people and the relevant social and material environment as a system. Specifically, we discuss what is to be gained if translation is studied from a distributed cognitive perspective. To this end, we illustrate key aspects of the discussion using empirical examples from current field research in which both an individual and a distributed perspective are applied to analyse interaction in a translation workplace.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Similarities: Birds of a feather
  • 3.Differences: Expanding the view
    • 3.1Boundaries of the unit of analysis
    • 3.2Structuration of activity
    • 3.3Role of artefacts
    • 3.4Role of representation(s)
  • 4.Situated approaches in CTIS
    • 4.1Empirical applications of situated approaches in CTIS
  • 5.Case study
    • 5.1Empirical extract
    • 5.2Analysis
      • 5.2.1Boundaries of the unit of analysis
      • 5.2.2Structuration of activity
      • 5.2.3The role of artefacts
      • 5.2.4The role of representations
  • 6.Final remarks and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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