Psychology-focused Studies Of Translation Process In Descriptive Perspective

The study of translation process has been in focus both at home and abroad; however, in a real sense, few studies have been done on the translation process in psychological perspectives, especially lacking some discovering experiments to describe it. Trying to fill the gap, the author attempts a down-to-earth investigation into psychological perspectives in translation process by focusing on translator's psychological process and the related factors affecting this psychological process. According to Holmes'classification within the framework of translation studies (qtd. in Toury 2001: 10), process-oriented translation studies belongs to descriptive instead of prescriptive category in the theoretical studies. While working with the descriptive approach, the author also borrows many new achievements in cognitive psychology researches to examine and expound the observations and findings from the investigation and experiment. Though the observed and obtained psychological activities and processes in translating are individual and accordingly different from person to person, it is noticeable that this revealing study does come up with some general governing rules which share certain core principles in the process. Among other things, the PHASED transformation from a Source Text to a Target Text taking place in the psychological process of translation can now be tentatively described, specifically as: input —analyzing—filter—PI-encoding —bilingual/ image processing —mental representation —MR-decoding —synthesizing —output. In the process each phase has its specific tasks and characteristics, and the principles of relevance and economy are obeyed. All of these are illustrated by the author's two experiments —TAPs experiment and a questionnaire survey with professional translators. Then two examples are cited to make a working model of the process. Still, some observed major factors affecting the psychological process are objectively reported. This thesis falls into four chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction to the research background, the purpose of this study; and above of all, setting up delimitation of the thesis. Chapter two is the main part of this thesis, beginning with theoretical groundings, followed by the hypothesis and two experiments —the second one is complementary to the first one, and then two examples to illustrate the working of the process. Chapter three deals with factors affecting this psychological process.