Priming Translation: Cognitive, Affective, and Social Factors

143 Pages·2022·1.866 MB·English

by  Douglas Robinson

Priming Translation
This innovative volume builds on Michael S. Gazzaniga’s Interpreter
Theory toward radically expanding the theoretical and methodological
scope of translational priming research.
Gazzaniga’s Interpreter Theory, based on empirical studies carried out
with split-brain patients, argues for the Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI), a
module in the brain’s left hemisphere that seeks to make sense of their
world based on available evidence—and, where no evidence is available,
primed by past memories, confabulates coherence. The volume unpacks
this idea in translation research to test whether translators are primed to
confabulate by the LBI in their own work. Robinson investigates existing
empirical research to test hypotheses on the translational links between
the LBI and cognitive priming, the Right-Brain Interpreter and affective
priming, and the Collective Full-Brain Interpreter and social priming.
Taken together, the book seeks to open translational priming studies up
to the full range of cognitive, affective, and social primes and to prime
cognitive translation researchers to implement this broader dynamic in
future research.
This book will be of interest to scholars in translation and interpreting
studies, especially those working in cognitive translation and interpreting
studies.
Douglas Robinson is Professor of Translation Studies at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. His recent Routledge books on
translation include The Behavioral Economics of Translation and
Translation as a Form: A Centennial Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s
“The Task of the Translator”.

Priming Translation
Cognitive, Affective, and Social Factors
Douglas Robinson
First published 2023
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Robinson, Douglas, 1954- author.
Title: Priming translation : cognitive, affective, and social factors /
Douglas Robinson.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022009670 | ISBN 9780367681159
(hardback) | ISBN
9780367681197 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003134312 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting--Psychological aspects. |
Translating and interpreting--Social aspects. | Cognition.
Classification: LCC P306.97.P79 R63 2023 | DDC
418/.02019--dc23/eng/20220309
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009670
ISBN: 978-0-367-68115-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-68119-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-13431-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003134312
Typeset in Sabon
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
Contents
Introduction: Prime Time 1
PART I
The Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI): Cognitive Priming 13
1 The Confabulating LBI 15
Empirical Research Review: Confabulation 15
Ideas for Research: “Overtranslation” as Confabulation
Primed by the LBI 17
Empirical Research Review: The LBI in Neurotypicals 20
Ideas for Research: LBI-Priming Normative Translation 25
PART II
The Right-Brain Interpreter (RBI): Affective Priming 29
2 The Affective RBI 31
Empirical Research Review: Right-Brain-to-Right-Brain
Affective Communication 31
Empirical Research Review: The Translator’s and Interpreter’s
Emotional Intelligence as Primed and Organized by the RBI 35
Classroom Report: The RBI as a Literary Interpreter 39
Ideas for Research: Translating as Traveling and the Transformative
Affect of Wonder 40
3 The Evolutionary Origins and Function of the RBI 44
Empirical Research Review: Evolutionary Origins 44
Sociological Research Report: Bourdieu on the Affective
“Secret Code” 45
vi Contents
Ideas for Research: The RBI as the “Secret Code”
of Translating 47
Anecdote: An Interesting Series of Events in
Volgograd, Russia 50
Ideas for Research: The Double-Binds of Translation 53
4 Aprosodic Linguistics 56
Theory: Correctness Anxiety 56
Empirical Research Review: Feeling Words 58
Ideas for Research: Not “Mindless” but
“Heartless” Translating 65
5 Parasomatic Semiotics 72
Theory: RBI Semiotics—The Peircean Interpretant 73
Theory: RBI Semiology—The Saussurean Parasomatics of
Language 76
Ideas for Research: The RBI-Priming Effects of Multimodal
Translations 79
Theory: Affective-Becoming-Conative Emergentism 79
Ideas for Research: Translation as an Indirect Speech Act 83
PART III
The Collective Full-Body Interpreter (CFBI): Social Priming 89
6 The CFBI and the Unification of Language 91
Theory: Bakhtinian Heteroglossia 91
Ideas for Research: Heteroglot CFBI Anchors and Primes for
Cognitive Translation Research 96
7 The Shared Interpreter 98
Empirical Research Review: Guidance through Social
Experience 100
Empirical Research Review: Priming 104
Ideas for Research: Priming Translation with Money
and Love 108
Conclusion 109
Notes 111
References 114
Index 130
Introduction
Prime Time
In “Shared Representations and the Translation Process,” Schaeffer and
Carl (2015) pose the question of what the source and target texts share
during the act of translating, and to that end mobilize the distinction that
de Groot (1997: 30) draws between “vertical” translation, where “the
source text is parsed and abstracted into more or less language[-]specific
concepts or even non-linguistic concepts and then re-expressed in the
target language” (Schaeffer and Carl 2015: 22), and “horizontal” transla-
tion, where “items in the two languages are linked via shared representa-
tions,” so that a given syntactic structure, say, will activate “a cognitive
representation which it shares with the target text” (23). As their title
suggests, they find it more cognitively useful and accurate to work on the
horizontal plane, where, they say, transference mostly operates through
“shared memory representations” (24; emphasis added) from the formal-
linguistic realms of morphology, syntax, and semantics and therefore can
be empirically tested through priming experiments in those specific lin-
guistic realms.
In this book, I pick up the methodological rationale for priming
research in translation at this point, and, while agreeing with Schaeffer
and Carl in principle—
Our view is that priming forms the basis for the horizontal method:
the influence of a previously processed item or structure on a subse-
quently processed item or structure forms the basis for horizontal
translation. This is in line with Pickering and Ferreira (2008: 447,
italics in the original) who argue that priming “reflects the operation
of an implicit learning mechanism,” i.e., that repeated exposure to
primes creates long-lasting memories. So rather than learning about
translational equivalents, implicit mechanisms during repeated expo-
sure to source and target texts establishes shared representations in
the translator’s long[-]term memory.
(26)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003134312-1
2 Introduction
—I expand the scope of experience within which “repeated exposure
to primes creates long-lasting memories” quite drastically. At the very
least, one would think linguistic pragmatics might offer another realm in
which “repeated exposure to primes creates long-lasting memories”—
how else do we learn to manage social interactions by the time we reach
majority? The social priming of levels of politeness, for example, is abso-
lutely essential for schoolchildren in talking to teachers and other
adults—and surely, as Hatim and Mason (1990) began insisting quite a
while ago, of great importance in translating as well. As I have suggested
(Robinson 2003, 2006a), most linguistic pragmatics remains quite for-
malistic—as I put it, “constative”—with a focus on abstract structure
rather than the interactive performance of social identities and other
realities, and that persistent formalism would seem to lend itself quite
nicely to the kind of cognitivist priming studies that Schaeffer and Carl
envision. But doesn’t the acquisition of social competence require
“repeated exposure to primes” of a more performative nature as well?
Don’t we learn to interact effectively with others by being primed in
action, in actual social situations where the stakes are high—where ridi-
cule and embarrassment all too easily flagellate the learner for the tiniest
mistake?
And speaking of ridicule and embarrassment: aren’t affective states the
most powerful primes of all, or at least the highly charged vehicles in
which primes ride? This is the realm in which I have situated my own
cognitivist studies of translation since The Translator’s Turn (1991), of
course, under the rubric of “the somatics of translation.” And more
recently, I have begun to expand somatic theory into the “ideological” or
“ideosomatic” realm of icosis, exploring how socioaffective normativities
prime adherence to ideological orthodoxies.1
But to be precise, I have not explored the performativity, somatics, and
icosis of translation in the explicit terms of primes. The priming of trans-
lators’ decisions has been implicit in all of my cognitivist work since The
Translator’s Turn; in this book, I make it explicit.
Note, however, several things that this book is not. Fabio Alves (2019:
xi), in his Foreword to García (2019), distinguishes between the kind of
4EA cognitive science explored in this book and the neurocognitive sci-
ence tracked by García:
Recently, however, a new trend has emerged in cognitive translation
and interpreting studies, advocating in favor of 4EA cognition,
namely, a view which considers human cognition, and indirectly the
act of translating and interpreting, to be embedded, extended,
embodied, enacted, and affective (Muñoz Martín 2017; Risku 2017).
When confronted with the present volume, it is then only natural
that readers versed in mainstream approaches within 4EA cognition
would ask: why should translation and interpreting studies be
Introduction 3
concerned with neurocognition at all? To that remark one could add
an even stronger question: why is it important to locate translation in
the brain when cognitive translation and interpreting studies seem to
be moving away from a strict experimental paradigm towards a view
of cognition which is situated and relies on contextual factors sur-
rounding cognitive aspects related to the act of translating and
interpreting?
On the one hand, this is not a study of neurocognition. In García’s terms,
my approach is “non-neural.” I am indeed interested in “a view of cogni-
tion which is situated and relies on contextual factors surrounding cogni-
tive aspects related to the act of translating and interpreting.” My research
is emphatically “within 4EA cognition.” On the other hand, however, that
inclination does not make this book purely humanistic—purely opposed
to “a strict experimental paradigm.” Priming studies are experimental
research that is psychocognitive rather than neurocognitive in focus.
Rather than studying neural pathways, they use priming to mobilize situ-
ated, contextual, attitudinal, and behavioral observations for empirical
research into the psychology of cognition.
The book is also not an empirical research report (though it contains
some empirical research reports); rather, it builds on other researchers’
empirical studies to develop priming tests as a blueprint for further
empirical research. Specifically, I draw on cognitive psychologist Michael
S. Gazzaniga’s intriguing “Interpreter Theory” to suggest cognitive, affec-
tive, and collective priming tests for the psychology of monolingual and
translingual discourse. Gazzaniga was lucky enough in the early 1960s,
as the PhD student of Roger Sperry at the California Institute of Technology
(Caltech), to get involved with the study of split-brain patients. In one
experiment, two decades in, he and his PhD student Joseph LeDoux—
now one of the world’s leading affective neuroscientists—showed a split-
brain patient’s right hemisphere the instruction to stand, and the patient
stood. But because the left hemisphere’s speech centers had no access to
instructions given to the right hemisphere alone, the patient had no idea
why he had stood up. So Gazzaniga asked him why he had stood up, and
he said that he needed to stretch.
That, Gazzaniga realized, was a confabulation. The left brain, without
access to the full story, had invented a story that seemed to impose a
plausible explanation on the standing. And from that, Gazzaniga began
to theorize the existence of a Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI) whose task it
was to explain the world based on the evidence available to it—and, even
when no evidence was available, to invent explanations, primed by past
memories of, say, standing to stretch stiff muscles.
Gazzaniga doesn’t mention priming: that’s my confabulation, if you
like. I argue here that the speculative path Gazzaniga sketches out for the
cognitive neuroscience of language, based on the positing of an LBI, leads