Does translation involve structural priming?

When asked to translate utterances, people might merely make sure that their translations have the same meaning as the source, but they might also maintain aspects of sentence form across languages. We report two experiments in which English-German and German-English bilinguals (without specialist translator training) repeated German ditransitive sentences whose meaning was compatible with more than one grammatical form or translated them into English. Participants almost invariably repeated the sentences accurately, thereby retaining the grammatical structure. Importantly, Experiment 1 found that they tended to repeat grammatical form across languages. Experiment 2 included a condition with sentences that had no grammatical equivalent form in English; here participants tended to persist in the order of thematic roles. We argue that cross-linguistic structural priming plays a major role in the act of translation

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Judul asli: Interpreter pour traduirexi, 352 p.; 21 cm

An evidence-based exploration into the effect of language-pair specificity in English-Chinese simultaneous interpreting

Whether and how language-pair specificity affects the process and product of interpreting is a recurring implicit topic of debate in interpreting studies. Previous discussions have touched upon this issue in Japanese/English and German/English interpreting, with little attention to its role in Chinese/English interpreting. This study focuses on the effect of structural asymmetry between English and Chinese on English-Chinese simultaneous interpreting performance, which is exemplified by right-branching structures in English and left-branching structures in Chinese. Based on a naturalistic observation of three professional interpreters’ on-site simultaneous interpretations of the same speech, it investigates two major questions: a) Does structural asymmetry between English and Chinese constitute particular difficulties in the interpreters’ interpreting performance? b) If yes, how does such language-pair specificity affect their interpreting product? While previous interpreting studies generally consider that the interpreting product is shaped by three major variables including the interpreter’s interpreting competence, cognitive conditions on the site and norms of interpreting, findings of the present study suggest that language-pair specificity functions as another variable in English-Chinese interpreting. It implies the necessity of considering it in the theoretical account of interpreting between languages such as English and Chinese that involve significant contrasts in linguistic structure and cultural conceptualization