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

standards for the design of similar studies. Kings’ extensive study of the
translation process of eight advanced students of French demonstrates the
immense wealth and richness of data that can be obtained by TAP as well as
the necessity to choose among all the possible variables for both the aim and
the analysis.
From the point of view of Translation Studies though, the research has a
drawback: the participants were not involved in translation as a professional
or even potentially professional activity; they were foreign language students
and teachers-in-training and translated their tasks the same way they would
have translated an ordinary assignment in a language class. In fact, the
translation brief specified they should translate in their usual manner.
Thus, the objective of Kings’ study was translating in a pedagogical
context or didactic translation, which is a rather different task than
translation as a professional activity. Nevertheless, the study provided a
number of research questions and categories to apply to analysis as well
as a highly fruitful way to use TAP in the study of the translation process
(Schmidt 2005: 22).
Gerloff published her study in 1988. She investigated and compared the
translation process of three different subject populations: four college students
of French, four bilingual speakers English/French without any experience of
translation, and four professional translators, normally translating from
French into English. The study focused on translation in one direction i.e.
from L2 (French) to L1 (English). Gerloff used essentially the same coding and
classifying categories as Krings. The most important finding is that more
experienced translators (experience here is defined in the context of
translating being an innate ability in bilinguals), such as both the professionals
and the bilinguals in her sample, do not necessarily translate more easily or
faster than the less experienced translators (here defined as the foreign
language students). From that, along with other indicators, she concluded
that experienced translators are more aware of the difficulty of the problems
they find and of their possible solutions; furthermore, they set higher
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