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Article published In: Target
Vol. 27:2 (2015) ► pp.273–300

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Thinking for translating

A think-aloud protocol on the translation of manner-of-motion verbs

 | University of Murcia
 | University of Murcia
Published online: 8 June 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/target.27.2.05cif
Typological studies on the linguistic expression of motion are certainly of interest to translation scholars. The study of how motion is expressed across languages has indeed revealed some striking typological differences (e.g., Talmy Talmy, Leonard. 1985. “Lexicalization Patterns: Semantic Structure in Lexical Forms.” In Language Typology and Lexical Descriptions: Vol. 3. Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon, ed. by Timothy Shopen, 36–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 1991. “Path to Realization: A Typology of Event Conflation.” Berkeley Linguistic Society 71: 480–519. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. 2 vols1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Berman, Ruth, and Dan I. Slobin, eds. 1994. Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Strömqvist, Sven, and Ludo Verhoeven. 2004. Relating Events in Narrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), which can account for some of the strategies translators resort to when dealing with motion expressions (. 1996. “From ‘Thought and Language’ to ‘Thinking for Speaking’.” In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, ed. by John Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson, 195–217. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. 2003. “What Translation Tells Us about Motion: A Contrastive Study of Typologically Different Languages.” International Journal of English Studies 3 (2): 151–176.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Cifuentes-Férez Cifuentes-Férez, Paula. 2006. La Expresión de los Dominios de Movimiento y Visión en Inglés y en Español desde la Perspectiva de la Lingüística Cognitiva. Unpublished M.A. thesis Universidad de Murcia., . 2013. “El Tratamiento de los Verbos de Manera de Movimiento y de los Caminos en la Traducción Inglés-Español de Textos Narrativos.” Miscelánea 471: 53–80.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide, and Luna Filipović. 2013. “Lexicalisation Patterns and Translation.” In Cognitive Linguistics and Translation: Advances in Some Theoretical Models and Applications, ed. by Ana Rojo and Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 251–282. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). However, the question still remains as to whether translators’ decisions are exclusively guided by such typological differences or whether there are other experience- or task-related factors that may explain their behaviour. This paper provides empirical evidence on the type of factors that guide translators’ decisions when translating manner-ofmotion verbs, exploring the impact of different types of texts and the translator’s level of expertise. For this purpose, a pilot think-aloud protocol is implemented in order to examine the translation process of ten Spanish translators (five professionals and five graduate students without professional experience) when transferring manner-of-motion verbs from English into Spanish. Our results reveal that the way translators deal with manner information is mainly influenced by typological differences between the two languages. But differences in the translators’ level of professional expertise and in task-related constraints (e.g., the degree in which different type of texts focus on motion verbs) also have an effect on the strategies that translators choose to convey manner information.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.‘Thinking for translating’ theory
  • 3.A think-aloud protocol on the translation of motion verbs
    • 3.1Aim
    • 3.2Participants
    • 3.3Materials
    • 3.4Procedure
    • 3.5Results and discussion
      • 3.5.1Task-related factors in the translation of manner-of-motion verbs
      • 3.5.2The role of expertise
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
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