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

impact on psycholinguistic research, including research on second language
learning, and, via L2 research, on translation studies (Jääskeläinen 1999).
“There has always been a kind of empirical research, like translation
criticism and error analysis, but this was product- and not process-oriented”
(Kussmaul and Tirkkonen-Condit: 177). In fact, when comparing the target
text with the source text or when looking at errors, one could at best speculate
in retrospect about what had occurred in the translator’s mind during
translation. What was needed was a way to discover what actually happens,
“to get a glimpse into the ‘black box’, as it were” (Kussmaul and Tirkkonen-
Condit: 178).
In this sense, viewing translation mainly as a problem-solving activity,
some scholars proposed that it should be possible to study it by means of
TAPs, and set up experiments to test this hypothesis. The different interests
and backgrounds of the researchers involved have resulted in a large variety of
independent approaches (Bernardini 1999).
This kind of analyses increases our potential for describing and
explaining the translation processes, and thus our theoretical understanding;
moreover, they have at least two pedagogical purposes. (1) The different
strategies observed in the TAPs may serve as models for successful translating
(Lörscher 1992a; Jääskeläinen 1993; Krings 1988; Kussmaul 1993). (2) If
translation students are used as subjects, TAPs may be used to find out where
they have problems. The data collected can then form a basis for translation
pedagogy (Krings, 1988; Kussmaul, 1989a+b, 1994). It might be argued that
teachers of translation, from years of experience, already know which
strategies to recommend to learners. But sometimes they draw the wrong
conclusions from their students’ translations. Teachers may, for instance, have
the impression that students have problems with text-comprehension while,
when talking to them, they find that students actually have problems
expressing what they had understood. TAPs can help teachers to see matters
more clearly (Kussmaul and Tirkkonen-Condit).
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