A Framework for Decision-Making in Translation

Wolfram Wilss
Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken

Decision-making in translation amounts to an information-processing concept that describes decision-making behaviour in terms of an interaction between the translator's cognitive system; his linguistic, referential, sociocultural and situational knowledge bases; the task specification; and the texttype-specific problem space. All four factors together enable the translator to build up an internal problem representation which, once constructed, will profoundly influence the translator's subsequent decision-making performance, taking account of probability ratings which are an important element in many translational decision-making settings.

Table of contents

The term "decision-making" has recently come to be used with a wide range of meanings covering a gamut of activities at the intersection of disciplines as diverse as economic sciences, statistics, philosophy, psycholinguistics, mathematics, operations research, computational science etc. These activities show that the last two decades have seen important conceptual changes in decision-making theory from a reliance on notions drawn from economic and statistical research to a focus on those drawn from cognitive psychology.

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