A Descriptive Study Of The Cognitive Efforts In Translation Performance Of Multilingual Translators From The Perspective Of Directionality

The history of translation studies and translation directionality took many turns throughout the years: it started with L1 translation as the main direction.Later appeared L2 translation that was criticized for its inability to produce authentic-looking texts.Yet,in the past 30-40 years,it has been working its way back with the help of globalization and immigration.It is meaningless to argue on the topic of the place and the importance of the two directions.Disparaging one direction and praising the other shouldn’t be the purpose of TS.On the contrary,linguists should do as much as they can to fill in the gaps in the fields,widen the opportunities and develop new ways and methods to study cognitive processes,strategies,and everything connected to translation.There is at least one more translation direction,apart from L1 and L2,that is practiced all over the world and contains a plethora of valuable information for many different fields but still has never found a place in Translation Theory-L3 translation direction.This study aims at bridging the gap in the fields of translation and linguistics by exploring and comparing cognitive efforts and difficulties in translation performance in three directions(L1,L2,and L3)produced by multilingual translators.To this end,the study sets out to display the differences between the foresaid translation directions and the impact of multilingualism on the translation process.More specifically,it is hypothesized that reading competence,writing skills,everyday practice,the resemblance between cultures and languages have a tight connection to the translation difficulties and cognitive processes in translation into L1,L2,and L3.Moreover,the three translation directions are expected to differ in:· The strategies the subjects use to solve the translation problems;· The resources they consult and their purpose;· The time spent on translation and proofreading;· The quality of a problem-solving activity;· The use of languages in the process of translation.The study is set up as a questionnaire with three translation tasks.The source texts for the tasks are selected from modern Chinese,English,and Russian literature.All the subjects participating in the research are multilingual,which means they have a high proficiency(B2-C2 level)in all the foreign languages they access during the translation tasks.The subjects are asked to fill in the pre-and posttranslation task questionnaires and produce six translations into their L1,L2,and L3.The data received from the answers alongside the translation task results shed some new light on the cognitive processes of multilingual translators and their use of languages.Although the study presents the quantitative and qualitative results,they are only performing a subsidiary role to illustrate the specifics of the translation directions.The findings are expected to be applicable in the fields of translation and linguistics.