Article published In: Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies in the Early Twenty First Century
Edited by Adolfo M. García, Edinson Muñoz and Néstor Singer
[Translation, Cognition & Behavior 6:2] 2023
► pp. 252–274
Empirical translation process research
Past and possible future perspectives
Published online: 7 March 2024
https://doi.org/10.1075/tcb.00088.car
https://doi.org/10.1075/tcb.00088.car
Abstract
Over the last four decades, considerable efforts have been devoted to the modeling and evaluation of human
translation processes. This article takes a closer look at the evolution of empirical Translation Process Research (TPR) within
the CRITT TPR-DB tradition. It contends that human translation unfolds on various processing levels and puts forth the Free Energy
Principle (FEP) and Active Inference (AIF) as a promising framework for modeling these intricately embedded processes in a
mathematically rigorous framework.
The article introduces innovative methods for quantifying fundamental concepts of Relevance Theory (relevance,
s-mode, and i-mode translation) and establishes their connection with the Monitor Model, framing relevance maximization as a
special case of free energy minimization. The framework presents exciting prospects for future research in predictive TPR,
promising to enhance our understanding of human translation processes and contributing significantly to the broader field of
translation studies and cognitive sciences in general.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction and historical background
- 2.The monitor model
- 3.Measuring relevance
- 3.1The field of relevance
- 3.2S-mode, i-mode, and relevance
- 3.3Shape of relevance
- 3.4Location of relevance
- 4.Free energy principle and active inference
- 5.Discussion
- Notes
References
References (66)
Alabau, Vicent, Jesús González-Rubio, Daniel Ortiz-Martínez, Germán Sanchis-Trilles, Francisco Casacuberta, Mercedes García-Martínez, Bartolomé Mesa-Lao, Dan Cheung Petersen, Barbara Dragsted, and Michael Carl. 2014. “Integrating
Online and Active Learning in a Computer-Assisted Translation
Workbench.” In Proceedings of the Workshop on Interactive and
Adaptive Machine Translation at the 11th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the
Americas, 1–8. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Albir, Amparo Hurtado. 2015. “The Acquisition of
Translation Competence. Competences, Tasks, and Assessment in Translator
Training.” Meta 60 (2): 256–280.
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.
Baddeley, Alan, and Graham Hitch. 1974. “Working
Memory.” Psychology of Learning and
Motivation 81: 47–89.
Baddeley, Alan. 2000. “The
Episodic Buffer: A New Component of Working Memory?” Trends in Cognitive
Sciences 4 (11): 417–423.
Bruineberg, Jelle, Julian Kiverstein, and Erik Rietveld. 2018. “The
Anticipating Brain is not a Scientist: The Free-Energy Principle from an Ecological-Enactive
Perspective.” Synthese 1951: 2417–2444.
Carl, Michael, and Barbara Dragsted. 2012. “Inside
the Monitor Model: Processes of default and challenged translation production.” Translation:
Corpora, Computation,
Cognition 2 (1): 127–145. [URL]
Carl, Michael, and Arnt Lykke Jakobsen. 2009. “Objectives
for a Query Language for User-activity Data.” Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on
Natural Language Processing and Cognitive
Science 11: 67–76. SCITEPRESS Digital Library.
Carl, Michael, and Martin Kay. 2011. “Gazing
and Typing Activities during Translation: A Comparative Study of Translation Units of Professional and Student
Translators.” Meta 56 (4): 952–975.
Carl, Michael, and Moritz Schaeffer. 2019. “Outline
for a Relevance Theoretical Model of Machine Translation
Post-editing.” In Researching Cognitive Processes of
Translation, edited by Defeng Li, Victoria Lai Cheng Lei, and Yuanjian He, 49–67. Singapore: Springer.
Carl, Michael. 2021. “A
Radical Embodied Perspective on the Translation
Process.” In Explorations in Empirical Translation Process
Research, 389–406. Singapore: Springer.
Carl, Michael, Moritz Schaeffer, and Srinivas Bangalore. 2016. “The
CRITT Translation Process Research Database.” In New Directions in
Empirical Translation Process
Research. Singapore: Springer.
Carl, Michael. 2012. “Translog-II:
a Program for Recording User Activity Data for Empirical Reading and Writing
Research.” Language Resources and
Evaluations 121: 4108–4112. Turkey: European Language Resources Association.
. 2023a. “Deep
temporal Models of the Translation Process”. ActInf GuestStream. [URL]
De Groot, Annette M. B. 1997. The cognitive study of
translation and interpretation: Three approaches. In Cognitive
processes in translation and
interpretation, pages 25–56.
Elgendi, Mohamed, Parmod Kumar, Skye Barbic, Newton Howard, Derek Abbott, and Andrzej Cichocki. 2018. “Subliminal
Priming-State of the Art and Future Perspectives.” Behavioral
Sciences 8 (6): 54.
Fields, Chris. 2023. Physics
as Information Processing. Active Inference Institute Online
Seminar. Accessed July 17,
2023. [URL]
Friston, Karl, Thomas FitzGerald, Francesco Rigoli, Philipp Schwartenbeck, and Giovanni Pezzulo. 2017. “Active
Inference: A Process Theory.” Neural
Computation 29 (1): 1–49.
Friston, Karl. 2009. “The
Free-Energy Principle: A Rough Guide to the Brain?” Trends in Cognitive
Sciences 13 (7): 293–301.
. 2010. “The
Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?” Nature Reviews
Neuroscience 11 (2): 127–138. Accessed February 23, 2023.
Gile, Daniel, and Victoria Lei. 2020. “Translation,
Effort and Cognition.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and
Cognition, 161. London: Routledge.
Gonçalves, José Luiz Vila Real. 2020. “Looking for Relevance into
the Eyes: In Search of Interpretive Resemblance in Translation through Gazing Data.” Cadernos
de
Tradução 40 (2): 17–44.
Gutt, Ernst. A. 1989/1991/2000. Translation and Relevance:
Cognition and Context. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Halverson, Sandra. 2003. “The
Cognitive Basis of Translation
Universals.” Target 15 (2): 197–241.
. 2010. “Cognitive
Translation Studies: Developments in Theory and
Method.” In Translation and Cognition, edited
by Gregory M. Shreve and Erik Angelone, 349–369. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2019. “‘Default
Translation’: A construct for Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies.” Translation,
cognition &
behavior 2 (2): 187–210.
Hansen, Gyde. 1999. “Introduction”. In Probing
the Process in Translation: Methods and
Results, 241. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.
Hedberg, Nancy. 2004. Slides
of talk. Accessed August 12,
2023. [URL]
Heilmann, Arndt. 2020. Profiling
Effects of Syntactic Complexity in Translation: A Multi-Method Approach. PhD
dissertation, RWTH Aachen University.
Hvelplund, Kristian Tangsgaard. 2011. Allocation of Cognitive
Resources in Translation: An Eye-Tracking and Key-Logging Study. PhD
dissertation, Copenhagen Business School.
Jakobsen, Arnt Lykke, and Lasse Schou. 1999. “Translog
Documentation, Version 1.0.” In Probing the Process in Translation:
Methods and Results, edited by Gyde Hansen, 1–36. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.
Jakobsen, Arnt Lykke. 2017. “Translation Process
Research.” In The Handbook of Translation and
Cognition, edited by John W. Schwieter and Aline Ferreira, 19–49. United States of America: Wiley.
Kirchhoff, Michael D., and Julian Kiverstein. 2021. “How
to Determine the Boundaries of the Mind: A Markov Blanket
Proposal.” Synthese 1981, 4791–4810.
Königs, Frank. 1987. “Was beim Übersetzen passiert: theoretische Aspekte, empirische Befunde und praktische
Konsequenzen.” [What happens during translation: Theoretical Aspects,
Empirical Findings and Practical Consequences]. Die Neueren
Sprachen 86 (2): 162–185.
Krings, Hans Peter. 1986. “Translation Problems and
Translation Strategies of Advanced German Learners of
French.” In Interlingual and intercultural
communication, edited by Julian House, and Shoshana Blum-Kulka, 263–75. Tubingen: Gunter Narr.
. 2001. Repairing Texts. Empirical
Investigations of Machine Translation Post-editing Processes, edited by Geoffrey S. Koby and translated
by Geoffrey S. Koby, George. M. Shreve, Katja Mischerikow, and Sarah Litzer. Kent, Ohio: Kent State U.P.
Lacruz, I., and Shreve, G. M. 2014. “Pauses
and cognitive effort in post-editing.” In Post-editing of machine
translation: Processes and applications, edited by Sharon O’Brien, Laura Winther Balling, Michael Carl, Michel Simard, and Lucia Specia, 246–272. United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Malmkjær, Kirsten. 1998. “Unit
of Translation.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation
Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 286–288. London: Routledge.
Muñoz, Martín Ricardo, and Matthias Apfelthaler. 2022. “A
Task Segment Framework to Study Keylogged Translation Processes.” Translation &
Interpreting 14 (2): 8–31.
Muñoz, Martín Ricardo. 2010. “On Paradigms and
Cognitive Translatology”. In Translation and
Cognition, edited by Gregory M. Shreve and Erik Angelone, 169–187. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2017. “Looking Toward the Future
of Cognitive Translation Studies.” In The Handbook of Translation and
Cognition, edited by John W. Schwieter and Aline Ferreira, 555–573. Oxford: Blackwell.
. 2021. “Situated
Cognition.” In Handbook of Translation Studies: Volume
5, edited by Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, 207–212. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Parr, Thomas, Giovanni Pezzulo, and Karl J. Friston. 2022. Active
Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and
Behavior. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Parr, Thomas, Emma Holmes, Karl J. Friston, and Giovanni Pezzulo. 2023. “Cognitive
Effort and Active
Inference.” Neuropsychologia 1841: 108562.
Parvizi-Wayne, Darius; Lars Sandved-Smith; Riddhi J. Pitliya; Jakub Limanowski; Miles R.A. Tufft; Karl J. Friston. 2023. Forgetting Ourselves in Flow: An Active Inference Account of Flow States. [[URL]]
Risku, Hanna, and Regina Rogl. 2020. “Translation
and Situated, Embodied, Distributed, Embedded and Extended
Cognition.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and
Cognition, 478–499. London: Routledge.
Risku, Hanna. 2012. “Cognitive
Approaches to Translation.” In The Encyclopedia of Applied
Linguistics, edited by Carol A. Chapelle, 675–684. London: Blackwell.
Schaeffer, Moritz, and Michael Carl. 2013/2015. “Shared
Representations and the Translation Process: A Recursive Model.” Translation and Interpreting
Studies 8 (2): 169–190. Reprint
in 2015 in Describing Cognitive Processes in Translation: Acts and
events, edited by Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow, Birgitta Englund Dimitrova, Séverine Hubscher-Davidson, and Ulf Norberg, 21–42. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Schaeffer, Moritz, Jean Nitzke, and Silvia Hansen-Schirra. 2020. “Predictive
Turn in Translation Studies: Review and Prospects.” In The Handbook
of the Changing World Language Map, edited by Stanley D. Brunn and Roland Kehrein, 3939–3961. United States of America: Springer.
Schaeffer, Moritz, Michael Carl, Isabel Lacruz, and Akiko Aizawa. 2016. “Measuring
Cognitive Translation Effort with Activity Units.” In Proceedings of
the 19th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine
Translation 4 (2): 331–345.
Schmaltz, Marcia. 2015. An
empirical-experimental study of problem solving in the translation of linguistic metaphors from Chinese into
Portuguese. PhD dissertation, University of Macau.
Serbina, Tatiana. 2015. A
Construction Grammar Approach to the Analysis of Translation Shifts. A Corpus-Based Study. PhD
dissertation, RWTH Aachen University.
Sjørup, Annette Camilla. 2013. Cognitive Effort in
Metaphor Translation: An Eye-Tracking and Key-Logging Study. PhD
dissertation, Copenhagen Business School.
Tirkkonen-Condit, Sonja. 2005. “The
Monitor Model Revisited: Evidence from Process
Research.” Meta 50 (2): 405–414.
Whyatt, Bogusława, Olga Witczak, Ewa Tomczak-Łukaszewska, Olha Lehka-Paul. 2023. The proof of the translation process is in the reading of the target text: An eyetracking reception study. Ampersand, Volume 111, .
Wilson, Deidre & Dan Sperber 2002. Relevance Theory. Proceedings of the Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics 2002 [[URL]]
Yamada, Masaru, Takanori Mizowaki, Longhui Zou, and Michael Carl. 2022. “Trados-to
Translog-II: Adding Gaze and Qualitivity data to the CRITT
TPR-DB.” In Proceedings of 23rd Annual Conference of the European
Association for Machine
Translation, 295–297. Belgium: European Association for Machine Translation.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Luo, Jingchun
Carl, Michael, Yuxiang Wei, Sheng Lu, Longhui Zou, Takanori Mizowaki & Masaru Yamada
Michael, Carl
[no author supplied]
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
