From texts to ergonomics and back

Invited keynoteThe shift in focus from the product of translation activities to the process of translation production and more recently to the producers of those translations has been the driving force in the research that has been done at our institute over the last two decades. Initial, rather naïve considerations of translations produced by our students at various levels of training highlighted the diversity of possible solutions for even apparently straightforward source text segments, not to mention entire texts. Using data collection techniques of various degrees of sophistication and ecological validity, we have observed students and professionals producing translations and derived alluring insights into their decision-making, problem-solving, and cognitive processing. However, these are not always in line with what the participants themselves have told us about what they did and why. A simple explanation for this might be that retrospective self-report is an unreliable method to obtain information about the translation process. Another explanation, which has been developing gradually through our work on the ergonomics of translation, is that the constraints and facilitators involved in the process of producing translations are multifold, overlapping, and interacting. When the cognitive, physical, and organisational conditions are good, then translators and other agents in the process are in a better position to produce good work. Other factors that have been identified as impinging on their performance and choices, such as temporal, spatial, societal, discursive, and ethical aspects of the world they are embedded in, might be realized as traces in their texts. Understanding translation as a situated activity and cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, and affective (4EA) can help explain translators’ behavior and might also help explain their translations