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Article published In: Interdisciplinarity in Translation and Interpreting Process Research
Edited by Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow, Susanne Göpferich and Sharon O'Brien
[Target 25:1] 2013
► pp. 107–124

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Investigating the conceptual-procedural distinction in the translation process

A relevance-theoretic analysis of micro and macro translation units

 | Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
 | Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil
Published online: 4 March 2013
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https://doi.org/10.1075/target.25.1.09alv
This article draws on relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) and its application to translation (. 2000. Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context, 2nd ed. Manchester: St Jerome. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) to investigate processing effort in translation in relation to two different types of encodings, namely conceptual and procedural encodings (. 2002. Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.   Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Wilson 2011). Building on the experimental paradigm of data triangulation in translation process research ( (ed). 2003. Triangulating Translation: Perspectives in Process Oriented Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [Benjamins Translation Library, 41.]   Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Jakobsen, Arnt. 2005. “Investigating Expert Translators’ Processing Knowledge.” In Knowledge Systems and Translation, ed. by Helle V. Dam, Jan Engberg, and Heidrun Gerzymisch-Arbogast, 173–189. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.   Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), it analyses the translation processes of eight professional translators when performing a direct and an inverse translation task. The analysis focuses on the number and types of encodings found in micro/macro translation units (Alves, Fabio, and Daniel Vale. 2009. “Probing the Unit of Translation in Time: Aspects of the Design and Development of a Web Application for Storing, Annotating, and Querying Translation Process Data.” Across Languages and Cultures 10 (2): 251–273.   Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; 2011). Results suggest that processing effort in translation is greater in instances of procedural than conceptual encodings.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical underpinnings
    • 2.1Relevance and translation: in search of a cause-effect relation
    • 2.2Some important relevance theory concepts
      • 2.2.1The principle of relevance and the effect-effort relation
      • 2.2.2The conceptual-procedural distinction in relevance theory
    • 2.3Revisiting the conceptual-procedural distinction in translation
  • 3.Methodological framework
    • 3.1Experimental design
    • 3.2Procedures for data analysis
    • 3.3Hypotheses
  • 4.Analyses and discussion
    • 4.1Types of macro translation units in direct/inverse translation tasks
    • 4.2Editing procedures in micro/macro translation units
    • 4.3Distance indicators of conceptual and procedural encodings
    • 4.4Processing effort in relation to conceptual and procedural encodings
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (23)
References
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