Volume 61, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Expanding the frame of Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies—situated cognition, communicative events, accessibility; Guest Editors: Ricardo Muñoz Martín and Bogusława Whyatt

In this introduction we look at the evolving research area of Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies (CTIS) through the lens of articles which report on cutting edge research in a variety of multilectal mediated communicative events. Seven contributions in this issue expand the frame of Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies with detailed, empirically grounded accounts of how language and mind interact in mediated communication. The new empirical evidence challenges key concepts, such as cognitive effort or translation expertise, and sheds light on overlooked areas of translation reception and accessibility research. Although the studies vary in topic and methods, they converge on a more sophisticated view of cognition in multilectal mediated communication which underscores its complexity and dynamics. The findings point to two overarching trends in CTIS research: (1) conceptual progress and (2) methodological sophistication. The contributors to this special issue are all mid- and early-career researchers and the development of their research expertise mirrors that of CTIS as a community of practice committed to producing knowledge based on empirical evidence and enriched by meaningful collaborative exchanges with neighboring disciplines.

Reading is key in sight interpreting/translation (SiT), a task in this study involving reading and orally rendering text at one’s own pace in a diplomatic interpreting scenario. However, little attention is given to how different reading processes are used. This study bridges this gap by investigating SiT reading processes, using silent reading (SR) and reading aloud (RA) for comparison to understand how reading varies between tasks and participants. Experienced interpreters, interpreting trainees, and untrained bilinguals were recruited to conduct SR, RA, and SiT. Their eye movement data underwent cluster analysis based on fixation duration and saccade length plus direction. Five distinct reading processes have been identified – skimming, rauding, two levels of problem-solving, and anchoring. While the overall reading pattern is similar, nuanced differences tell groups and tasks apart. Due to the limitation of space, this paper only reports findings centring on the participants. Significant differences exist only between the trained (i.e., interpreters and trainees combined) and untrained cohorts in three processes, namely skimming, rauding (normal reading), and problem-solving, almost exclusively in SiT. Our findings attest to the multifaceted SiT reading processes and offer an alternative account to associating fixation duration solely with cognitive load, helping us better understand SiT reading.

How experience-dependent plasticity can lead to structural and functional brain changes has long been examined in cognitive studies, leading neurolinguistics to investigate how brain structure and functionality are affected by training and controlling multiple languages in a similar manner. Overlapping networks of language control and domain-general executive functions are implicated in this process of managing elevated control demands in coordinating more than one language. Simultaneous interpreting (SI), as a cognitively extremely taxing way of controlling languages, holds a special status. SI involves high processing demands and frequent switching between languages under time pressure. Therefore, SI offers important insight on how task switching abilities may change through training language control in a professional setting. Within a longitudinal design using event-related potentials, this study examines how the executive function of switching progresses during interpreting training. Results show a progression of voltage in the P300 time window until Session 4, followed by a decrease that indicates an automation of attention switching and working memory updating. No significant effects were found within the N200 time-window, which only allows for observing a trend towards progression of N200 over time, suggesting the development and subsequent automation of inhibitory control aspects of switching induced by interpreting training.

This experimental study examines the relationship between accented speech and community interpreters’ stress. While previous studies have examined the potential impact of accent on interpreter performance, the interplay between stress and accent has received limited attention. The present study combines both in a single experimental study to investigate their potential relationship along with other participant-level variables. The results of this study were inconclusive regarding the level of stress experienced by community interpreters between the standard and regional US accents, which may suggest that accented language within a country may not be as strong of an influence on the stress levels in community interpreting. Participant-level variables including interpreter self-efficacy and trainee versus professional interpreters also showed non-significant results. However, the effect of task order was observed in the experimental setting, with the first interpreting task triggering a higher level of stress than the second task. This result suggests that there is a potential practice effect on interpreting performance and that stress results from the onset of the interpreting task as opposed to accented speech. In general, this study sheds new light on accent as a variable in interpreting, suggesting that the previously-observed impact of regional accentual varieties in simultaneous interpreting may not neatly extrapolate to other interpreting contexts or settings.

Summary translation is a regular practice in the government, commercial, and industrial sectors, yet it has received little attention in Translation Studies. Summary translation differs from “normal full translation” in the level of deliberate semantic reduction and linguistic compression or expansion relative to the source text (ST), the extent of ST–target text (TT) correspondence and the differential weighing of content. This qualitative study investigated the cognitive processes involved in summarizing translation. For this study, keystroke logging data were collected from 26 third-year BA students of Applied Linguistics who were asked to translate a Spanish opinion piece into Dutch by reducing the ST word count by more than 50 %. An analysis of the keystroke logging data, the researcher’s observational notes and paper copies of the ST showed that summarization takes place in all the phases of the translation process. During the pre-writing phase, ST content weighing and selection could be observed in the highlighting of keywords, phrases and/or sentences in the ST. Moreover, outline planning could be observed, indicating a hierarchical organisation of the discourse. These ST markings and TT outlines seemed to serve as cognitive artefacts, since the students used them both to start and to guide their TT drafting. During the TT drafting, two major translation strategies could be observed: literal patchwork translation and paraphrasing. Summarization during TT drafting was carried out through omission, deletion (through online revision), generalization, and construction strategies – the latter two being especially present among those students who employed the paraphrasing strategy. Interestingly, eight students did not engage directly in summarization but started to translate the first ST paragraphs in full, although they subsequently switched to a more summarizing approach. Summarization through the deletion of TT content and/or the reduction of the TT word count was also observable in the post-writing phase. A certain interplay could be observed between planning and TT production strategies.

Recent advancements in Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies (CTIS) have spurred a surge in experimental research, particularly in Audio Description (AD) studies. This shift has aimed to deepen the understanding of the cognitive processes involved in both the creation of AD and its reception by visually impaired users. Research has focused on the reception of various AD types and styles, examining factors such as language type, voice, and intonation. However, most experimental studies have concentrated on AD for film. Addressing this gap, the current study introduces an experiment that investigates the cognitive and emotional effects of different AD styles in the context of contemporary dance within the performing arts. Thirty-three visually impaired participants listened to four 5-minute contemporary dance pieces with AD (2 with a descriptive version of the AD vs. 2 with a creative version of the AD). We implemented a within-subject design to control for inter-subject variability. Both self-report and physiological methods were used to measure AD reception, which involved the cognitive effort invested by visually impaired users (cardiac deceleration and self-reported effort), the pleasantness experienced (electrodermal activity and self-reported valence, arousal, sense of presence, engagement, and satisfaction), and their ability to recall AD details (a post-task tailor-made questionnaire). Although participants reported a preference for the creative version over the descriptive one, self-report measures and physiological data revealed that the emotional responses elicited by creative clips were experienced negatively. This discrepancy between retrospective interviews and momentary biomarkers of emotional experience highlights the significance of users’ familiarity with the type of AD.

This article presents a bibliometric analysis of metaphor research in Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) from 1964 to 2023. An ad-hoc database of 1,023 publications was built based on bibliographic records retrieved from Bibliography of Interpreting and Translation and Translation Studies Bibliography . Descriptive analyses of historical development, cognitive theoretical frameworks adopted, authorship patterns, and publication patterns were conducted to map the general landscape of the field. Furthermore, a four-layer coding frame was applied to conduct fine-grained analyses of empirical studies, classifying them according to their mediation of communication, research orientation, and research method. The results show that the potential overlap between metaphor research and Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies (CTIS), a growing sub-field of TIS, is yet to be substantial. Much remains to be done to incorporate metaphor research into CTIS. Following recent theoretical and methodological advancements in Metaphor Studies and CTIS, this article ends with suggestions of how the unfinished cognitive turn of metaphor research in TIS could be brought to completion.

This contribution addresses methodological challenges in integrating translation process, product, and reception data, and explores intricate relationships between translator’s cognitive effort, translation quality, and the readers’ cognitive effort. The interplay is examined with an eyetracking experiment in which participants read professional L2→L1 translations (whole texts) of varying quality (high vs. low). The analysis focuses on meaning integration and re-processing during L1 reading, operationalised through three eyetracking measures: dwell time, number of runs, and re-reading dwell time. The texts read are either high-quality translations (an end-product of a translator with many years of professional experience) or low-quality translations (delivered by a less experienced professional translator). Each L2→L1 translation consists of eight sentences. Each sentence in the text thus has a record of each reader’s cognitive effort (eyetracking measures), and a record of translator’s cognitive effort operationalised as the time taken by the translator to deliver a translation of a target sentence. Results reveal a significant interaction effect: readers exert more cognitive effort when reading low-quality translations, particularly when the translator’s effort is lower, whereas high-quality translations elicit increased reader’s effort when the translator’s effort is higher. Moderated mediation analyses further show that readers’ proficiency in the source text language (L2) mediates the relationship between the number of years they use their L2 and cognitive effort invested in reading L1 translations, but only in the case of low-quality translations. These findings underscore the complex dynamics between translation production and reception, highlighting the role of individual differences in shaping cognitive processing. The study contributes to the growing body of research in Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies by bridging process- and reception-oriented approaches, and by offering insights into how translator’s effort and decisions impact reading processes.