Thinking for translating

Abstract

Typological studies on the linguistic expression of motion are certainly of interest to translation scholars. The study of how motion is expressed across languages has indeed revealed some striking typological differences (e.g., Talmy 1985, 1991, 2000; Berman and Slobin 1994; Stromqvist and Verhoeven 2004), which can account for some of the strategies translators resort to when dealing with motion expressions (Slobin 1996; Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2003; Cifuentes-Férez 2006, 2013; Ibarretxe-Antuñano and Filipović 2013). However, the question still remains as to whether translators’ decisions are exclusively guided by such typological differences or whether there are other experience- or task-related factors that may explain their behaviour. This paper provides empirical evidence on the type of factors that guide translators’ decisions when translating manner-ofmotion verbs, exploring the impact of different types of texts and the translator’s level of expertise. For this purpose, a pilot think-aloud protocol is implemented in order to examine the translation process of ten Spanish translators (five professionals and five graduate students without professional experience) when transferring manner-of-motion verbs from English into Spanish. Our results reveal that the way translators deal with manner information is mainly influenced by typological differences between the two languages. But differences in the translators’ level of professional expertise and in task-related constraints (e.g., the degree in which different type of texts focus on motion verbs) also have an effect on the strategies that translators choose to convey manner information.