Towards a Multi-facet Concept of Translation Behavior

Wolfram Wilss
Universität des Saarlandes

The aim of this paper is to pin down the mental factors which essentially account for efficient translation performance: first, context; second, culture; third, originality and automatization; fourth, speed; and fifth, processual components such as inferencing, schematizing, mapping, comparing, evaluating, problem-solving, decision-making, intuiting and rule & strategy formation. The whole presentation amounts to a specification of information-processing factors that are instrumental in: 1. learning how to behave intelligently and creatively when one is confronted with a novel or a familiar intertextual transfer situation; 2. planning what operations have to be executed in a specific environmental situation; 3. executing them on the basis of a repertoire of knowledge and skills which shows that behavior-in-context is practically always the result of an organized functioning of both cognitive and noncognitive (associative) processes.

Table of contents

The aim of this paper is to pin down in a tentative fashion the kind of cognitive potential which accounts for efficient translation performance or what also might be called the principles of translational information-processing. Although there is, to my knowledge, no universally accepted list of relevant properties for translational behavior, a number of such properties are widely accepted as components of human cognitive functioning of which translation is a particularly good case in point. We all agree, e.g., that translation is a goal-directed activity which basically consists of a decoding and an encoding phase, a dichotomy which can be replaced by decomposition/recomposition, comprehension/reconstruction or, in a more mysterious formulation, deverbalization/reverbalization. I call deverbalization mysterious because nobody actually seems to know exactly what it means and because the thinking-aloud method has shown—or is trying to show—that going from source text (ST) to target text (TT) is not a wordless procedure (Diehl 1981; Krings 1986; Konigs 1988).

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