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

5. 1. JOINT-TRANSLATION’S LIMITS
Someone could argue that “making people translate together is as
artificial as asking them to think aloud while translating, since most
translators usually work alone” (Jääskeläinen 1999: 80). For this reason,
Séguinot studied the translation processes of two professional translators who
were used to work together. Findings show that dialogue protocols illuminate
the ‘non-rational’ element in translation: during the translation process, the
translators’ discussion shifted to areas which had nothing to do with the task
at hand (Séguinot 1996). The findings also “indicate that translation is non-
linear and iterative, i.e. the mind keeps looking for alternatives even after a
translation problem has been solved” (Jääskeläinen 1999: 80). Furthermore,
there is evidence of parallel processing during translating.
Data from joint activity may be richer, more natural and even more
interesting than think-aloud reports, but they do not provide access to the
solitary translation process. The object of the research is different in the two
experimental conditions. Moreover, it seems that joint activity elicits more
sophisticated strategies form the subjects. This can be due to the re-activation
of automatized processes in the case of professional translators or
externalizing unused strategies in the case of translation students or, as House
or Matrat argue, that joint activity is better able to capture the underlying
mental processes than thinking-aloud. However, on the bases of these studies,
the latter conclusion seems premature.
Another problem with joint activities is that they may distort the results.
One of the subjects may assume a leading role, because of his personality.
Thus, other subjects may accept solutions not because they are better but
because they are proposed by the more dynamic person. In other cases,
subjects may hold back their ideas for reasons of politeness, or even chivalry.
When analyzing the dialogue protocols the researcher should therefore take
care to observe only those processes where subjects take an equal part in
solution-finding. One way of minimizing this kind of problems would be to
choose “matching” subjects, with no psychological or social superiority of one
over the other and where personalities are quite similar (Kussmaul, 1995).
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