A Comparative Empirical Study On The Translation Process Of Student And Expert Translators

The study of translation has primarily been concerned with translation as a product for a long time. Since 1980s, however, there has been an increase in the interest of empirical research into translation process. Some scholars put forward the suggestion that it should be possible to unveil the"black box"in translation process by means of think-aloud used in cognitive psychology, and have set up experiments to test this hypothesis.This thesis aims at investigating the translation process of Chinese translators when they fulfill both C-E and E-C translation tasks. There are 12 participants divided into two groups: the students group consisting of 8 undergraduates majoring in English, and the experts group consisting of 4 expert translators. Think-aloud method is used to collect data from participants'self-reporting of their mental process, thus the concurrent think-aloud protocols, complemented with retrospective reports and observable behaviors are gathered to be my data sources. These data after being coded and analyzed provide different evidences to describe what strategies the translators (8 students and 4 experts) have employed and what processing levels they have gone through in the translation process. Similarities and differences are identified between student and expert translators, contributing to the constitution of translation expertise.The study finds that all the participants, students or experts, employ all the seven types of strategies (problem identification, storage and retrieval, general search and selection, inferencing and reasoning, text contextualization, monitoring of TT, extra textual and language use/task monitoring), processing at three levels (rhetorical, conceptual and linguistic). However, they do differ qualitatively and quantitatively. Students use more local strategies such as general search and selection than global strategies inferencing and reasoning for example, while the experts tend to use them averagely, defining and solving global problem before local ones,to get a thorough understanding of the ST. Though transferring at linguistic level takes up the largest proportion for both the experts and the students, the former spends much more time on rhetorical analysis of the ST and its context before actual translating. These differences highlight the characteristics of translation expertise: (1) spend more energy on rhetorical analysis and meaning construction, (2) engage in translating in a more controlled top-down way, (3) play an active role as a mediator between language and culture of the ST and TT.