Third Culture Elements As A Source Of Difficulty For Translators:a Keylogging And TAPs Approach

This thesis attempts to tap into third culture elements as a source of translation difficulty based on the results of an empirical study that uses keylogging and TAPs as its research methods.The third culture is a multicultural phenomenon that appears at the border of two cultures.The term was first introduced in the studies on third culture kids(TCKs),children who spent a significant period of their formative years in a culture outside their parents’ culture(s).Such multicultural experience shapes their identity creating a hybrid culture balancing between their first(home)culture and second(host)culture.In the field of TS,it has mostly been explored in the third culture elements theory largely developed by the Polish school of TS;most of the existing works are product-oriented descriptive studies.This paper attempts to approach the issue of the third culture elements as a source of translation difficulty that is studied within the cognitive paradigm.It uses the definition by Sun and Shreve and understands translation difficulty as a cognitive endeavor of solving a translation problem and the amount of cognitive resources taken up in this endeavor for a translator to achieve objective and subjective performance.20 translators whose native language was either Chinese or Russian were invited to participate in an experiment,where they had to perform a translation of three test passages into their native languages.The texts contained elements from three cultural backgrounds;SL culture was represented by American culture and the third culture was represented by Chinese culture and Russian culture.The study uses the Dale-Chall readability formula to measure text difficulty and analyzes the problem-solving process and the changes in the CE to identify translation-specific difficulty.The data used in this study are statistically significant(the Shapiro-Wilk Test,p<0.05);the major findings of this research are as follows:1.The third culture elements caused an increase in the CE more often than the elements of SL culture.The increase in the CE during the translation process of SL culture,the third culture of TL origin,and the third culture of a foreign origin occurred in 33%,80%,and 68% of the cases,respectively.There was also a significant increase in the percentage of the culture-related comments in the verbal reports delivered on the texts containing the third culture elements;this tendency was observed in 85% of the cases.Therefore,the study has proven that the third culture elements caused an increase in the level of translation difficulty;and the Dale-Chall readability formula could not predict it.2.The analysis of TAPs has shown a necessity to improve the translators’ preexperimental training to analyze the loci and behaviors of problem-solving more efficiently,as the subjects currently lack the skill of verbalizing the problem-solving processes at the locus of production.The researcher had to reject the hypothesis about the C-T-P bundles being the most common scenario of solving translation problems caused by the third culture.3.The comparison of translation problems reported on by the native speakers of Chinese and Russian shows that the difference in the languages they speak influences the translation process and increases the level of translation difficulty.We believe it proves that evaluating the national cultural difference between the SL and the TL is not enough to measure the translation difficulty of the third culture since the ST contains cultural information about at least two cultures.The researcher should also account for the cultural distance between the TL culture and the third culture in the ST.