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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 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158, USA and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN, UK Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business. © 2023 Douglas Robinson The right of Douglas Robinson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trade- marks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifica- tion and explanation without intent to infringe. 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

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