Anthony Pym
Menu of talks available, July 2013
Talk 1: Advances in cognitive research on translation processes
This talk reviews recent findings of empirical research on the way people translate, with
particular attention to studies involving eye-tracking. If we look at the differences between
novices and professionals, it is found that greater experiences tends to correlate with more topdown processing, larger translation units, faster reading times, more time spent on revision,
fewer revisions, and more attention to the translation instructions, among other features. These
results are of interest because, in theory, the differences between novices and professionals are
the skills we should be training translators in. Further, the tendencies tend to form a narrative
that is coherent with the ideals of the Skopos approach: translators need to pay less attention to
the smaller units and greater attention to the larger, interactive structures, or so we are told.
However, this convenient narrative is perturbed by other empirical studies that show
professional translators translating in a faster, more literal way, and asking themselves
significantly fewer questions about aspect like text functions or translator-client relations. This
talk will propose a way in which such findings can be made compatible with the general trend of
empirical research. The result will hopefully be a more realistic assessment of the skills we
should be developing in our translation classes.
Talk 2. The impact of translation technologies
This talk will start from a review of recent findings on the way translators work with translation
memories and machine translation (postediting). It is found that these technologies not only
enable translators to work faster (in many cases), but also improve terminological and
phraseological accuracy and variation. As translators thus feed better translations into free
online databases, the quality of machine translation output should improve steadily and all
translators will eventually be doing nothing more than postediting the outputs. Translators will
become checkers. However, there is also a reverse process by which worse translations are
entered into the databases, and the technologies then deliver progressively worse translations.
This talk will attempt to predict which of these two tendencies will win out, and thus what the
future role of translators will be. The analysis will also attempt to distinguish between the
effects of translation memories and machine translation, indicating why the latter promises
richer, more engaging texts, and why no one will be reading them linearly anyway.
Talk 3: Translation and inculturation
Rather than communicate between cultures, it is possible that translation is used to extend
cultures, bringing new language groups into the fold of a central culture that expands and
progressively modified in the process. This talk will discuss how this has happened in the case of
the Catholic Church, where the model is called “inculturation”. Indeed, for Vatican II, translation
policy is only a part of inculturation policy, and the key debates concern the extent to which the
central culture (the Church) should allow itself to be changed by translations to and from other
cultures. An important element in this mode of thought is the way in which the Catholic Church
has been able to re-write its own past as a history of translation and inculturation, rather than of
revelation and identity. The main focus of the talk is not the Catholic Church, however: we can
also ask if the same model can be applied in cases of other cultural formations, including the
European Union, the culture of empirical science, the world university system, or international
soccer. The pursuit of such examples shows, first, that inculturation is not always successful, and
that translations are also carried out, as Vossler foresaw, as a means of “self-preservation”, as a
defense against absorption. It also suggests, second, that the dimensional movement is not
enough: in history, translation has also been a part of out-culturation, meta-culturation, subculturation, and much more.
Talk 4: Translation and language teaching
Once regarded as a non-communicative activity, translation is making a return to the foreignlanguage classroom. This talk reports on some of the arguments in favor of this return,
particularly those based on advances in neuroimaging studies of bilinguals, as well as studies of
students’ interaction and motivation. It will present reasons for the historical criticisms of
translation as a means of language learning, focusing on the range of different “translation
concepts” that are used in our neighboring disciplines. In order to challenge the more narrow
concepts of translation, a series of ideas will be presented about the ways in which translation
activities can be used in the L2 classroom. Some of the data will be drawn from an ongoing
European Commission research project on the role of translation in language teaching, which
incorporates data from a recent survey conducted in China.
Talk 5: Making sense of translation laws and universals
Since the work of the Tel Aviv School in the 1980s, empirical translation scholars have been
attempting to define textual features that tend to be more frequent in translations than in other
kinds of texts. We thus have hypotheses concerning the “universals” of lexical simplification,
explicitation, adaptation, equalizing, and unique items, to which can be added Toury’s proposed
“law of growing standardization” and “law of interference”. Close analysis of these proposals,
however, suggests that they are poorly defined, overlapping, and unable to cover all textual
phenomena that are called “translations” (that is, they are not “universal”). They do
nevertheless suggest a certain mindset that is shared by some translators and researchers. This
talk proposes that the underlying mindset is based on risk-aversion. In other words, all the
proposed universals and laws can be explained in terms of modes of communication where the
costs of failure are greater than the rewards of taking risks – the various tendencies would then
be the rational result of a particular reward structure. Yet this need not mean that all translators
are risk-averse. Examples will be given of high-risk translators, some of whom have achieved
significant rewards, and all of whom put paid to the theories of universals.