Integration of translation and summarization processes in summary translation

"Summary translation" is a form of translation that is much more common in the federal government than in commercial environments, and so is rarely studied and generally ill understood. While it involves many of the processes that emerge in the nor-mal full translation task (verbatim translation in government parlance), because the final result of this cross-language task is a summary as well as a translation, the summary translator must effectively integrate the component cognitive processes of both summari-zation and translation. The extreme transactional influence of the request for information that initiates a summary translation produces at least four significant areas of difference between summary and full translation, which involve: the extent of semantic reduction and linguistic compression/expansion, the extent of source-text/target text correspondence, and the differential weighting of semantic content. Each of these areas of difference has implications for some of the gross cognitive processes underlying translation: text com-prehension (from reading or listening), hierarchical discourse processing, mental model construction, task-based decision-making/problem-solving, and text production.