Relatore: Professor Bruno OSIMO - Bruno Osimo, traduzioni ...

of his conscious effort is aimed at solving the problem, and there is no room
left for reflecting on what he is doing. For this reason, there is no delay and
the data gathered are direct; the subject does not interpret his thoughts nor is
he required to bring them into a predefined form, but he renders them just as
they come to mind. However, think aloud protocols are not necessarily
complete because a subject may verbalize only part of his thoughts (Someren,
Barnard and Sandberg 1994).
With tasks in which thinking aloud is not possible (e.g. simultaneous
interpreting), data can be collected through retrospective verbal reports.
“They ought to be elicited immediately after the task performance
(immediate retrospection) and with as little interference from the
experimenter as possible” (Ericsson and Simon 1984: 19).
2. 1. 5. DIALOGUE PROTOCOLS
Although monologue protocols are still predominantly the main tool for
collecting data, the artificiality that still remains has led some researchers
(House 1988; Hönig 1990 and 1991; Kussmaul 1989a, 1989b, 1993 and 1994;
Schmid 1994) to get subjects to talk to each other. In a small-scale experiment,
House compared monologue and dialogue protocols applied to translation
tasks. The findings show that in monologue protocols processes as selecting
target language items, weighing alternatives and choosing a particular
translation equivalent remained unverbalized (House 1988). In contrast, when
people collaborate they will sometimes have differing opinions. Thus they are
forced to give arguments, to clarify steps of their thinking processes. In fact,
when talking in pairs, subjects negotiated solutions to translation problems
and each individual’s thoughts appeared to have been consistently shaped due
to the necessity of having to verbalize them. House concluded that the
dialogue situation provided richer data than monologue protocols (House
1988). “Later TAP experiments have shown, however, that the richness of data
depends on the type of subjects and the translation brief, and, above all, on the
priorities of the researcher” (Kussmaul and Tirkkonen-Condit: 180).
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