On the role of metacognitive proficiency in translation. Investigating the role of Theory of Mind in translation in terms of neural substrates, process and product data

To find out whether translation trains Theory of Mind, 34 participants with two different levels of translation training (18 BA/ 16 MA; 4 males; mean age 26.23, mean sd: 6.9) are compared in three experiments using fMRI, eye-tracking and key-logging. Results show that the translation activates parts of the ToM network (temporal lobe, precuneus) and that MA students focus on the ToM condition, whereas BA students spend more time on the noToM condition. The latter seem to develop time-consuming compensation strategies. This thesis sheds a new light on the role of non-linguistic macrocompetences in the translation process. It discusses the relation between cognitive effort and metarepresentation. Finally, the ToM concept allows for parameterising one of the central features of translation, the representation of others on a cognitive level