The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
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@Linguist_CIOL aPRIL/MaY The Linguist 11 FEATURES Stewart 2 were among the first researchers to study translation directionality empirically. Based on a study in which 16 bilingual participants conducted single-word translation tasks, they proposed a Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) to account for the "translation asymmetry": forward translation (FT) is more likely to involve time-consuming conceptual processing, while backward translation (BT) can be done by the simpler process of lexical association. The RHM has triggered huge debates and a considerable amount of follow-up research, part of which cited behavioural evidence in its favour. Reaction time was found to be significantly longer for FT than BT irrespective of task type, language combination and the cognateness, concreteness or familiarity of the word stimuli. Some neuroimaging studies reported that FT involves significantly enhanced activation in areas of the brain associated with language production (Broca's area), and also in areas associated with regulating movements. Examining specific brain areas Professional translation requires the development of specialised expertise through task-specific training, so researchers have asked whether translation requires a particular cognitive processing style that utilises specific brain areas. They have compared the cognitive load of reading-for-repetition and reading-for-translation, and found that the latter takes more time and requires more working memory, most likely due to the parallel activation of target and source lexical entries. Neuroimaging technologies have enabled researchers to pinpoint the locations in the brain activated when a task is being carried out (known as neural correlates) and create an image of them as translators perform reading and translation tasks. By identifying the neural correlates associated with translation but not associated with reading, they have been able to track translation-specific processes or routes. PET, fMRI and fNIRS evidence indicates that translation entails more cognitive effort than reading. The traditional 'localisationist' view is that language switching is mainly controlled by the frontal brain regions. 3 However, this new evidence shows that translation engages neural networks in different areas of the brain, which implies that translation is embedded in more general linguistic and executive systems. Simultaneous interpreting and extreme control another challenging question that has attracted researchers is how simultaneous interpreters deal with the extreme language use involved, and what sort of neural mechanisms enable them to control (perceive and produce) two languages simultaneously. Research in this area led by alexis Hervais-adelman and Barbara Moser-Mercer revealed that two regions associated with decision making and executive control (the caudate nucleus and putamen) are key to this demanding cognitive process. 4 There is no single brain centre devoted exclusively to the control of interpreting, and the brain areas that control the process are generalist, contradicting the traditionalist view. The team also conducted a longitudinal study to see whether interpreting training could lead to a change in brain structure or functioning. 5 They found a reduced recruitment of the right caudate nucleus, which controls all sorts of skilled actions during simultaneous interpreting, as a result of training. This means that the impact of such training on the brain is not specifically linguistic, but involves a variety of domain-general executive functions. In other words, the effect of simultaneous interpreting training is to make the brain's executive functioning in the caudate more efficient, and this can be measured in lower activation levels in the brain of a trained interpreter. Sight translation In collaboration with neuroscientists at Cambridge and Durham universities, my research focuses on the neural basis of translating individual sentences between English and Mandarin Chinese – languages which differ greatly in many respects. We used fMRI to investigate differences in the brain area of activation when 25 female mother-tongue Chinese trainee translators read aloud (as the baseline), carried out sight translation, and performed FT (Mandarin to English) and BT (English to Mandarin). We discovered that reading or translating English caused more activation in IMaGES © SHuTTERSTOCK