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Previously published in Translation Spaces 6:1 (2017) According to the International Ergonomics Association, a focus on organizational ergonomics recognizes that people work within socio-technical systems that encompass tools, equipment, and computer interfaces as well as other actors in their professional environment and networks. In recent research, we have started investigating such socio-technical factors from an ergonomic perspective. Observations at professional workplaces, responses to questionnaires, and indepth interviews with translators suggest that their perceived self-determination is more important to the success of socio-technical change than the technological developments themselves. A lack of involvement in decision-making at the workflow level may explain why so many translators have been resistant to taking new technology on board. We discuss how a feedback culture could mitigate many socio-technical issues by giving translators a voice in change and empowering them to contribute to organizational learning and growth.

Machines are learning fast, and human translators must keep pace by learning about, with and from them. Deep learning (DL) and neural machine translation (NMT) are set to change the face of translation and the distributions of primary tasks, with TAUS predicting Fully Automatic Useful Translation (FAUT) by 2030. Although theoretical and practical courses on computer-aided and/or machine translation abound, less attention has been paid to DL and NMT. Although NMT is still at the R&D stage, it shows great promise for relieving human translators of the tedium of repetitive routine work. The challenge for translation education is to give students the knowledge and tool kits to learn when and how to embrace the new technologies, and to exploit how and when the added value of human intuition and creativity can and should be deployed

Encountered at all levels of language, conceptual asymmetries between source and target languages present translators with fundamental challenges that require problem awareness, problem identification and problem solving. A case in point is conceptual metaphor in translation. Versions of conceptual metaphor theory have been applied in various productoriented studies of how translators deal with the challenge of metaphor in translation. However, there is potential in combining product-oriented approaches with techniques used to access translators’ cognitive processes, although process-oriented studies on how conceptual metaphor is re-conceptualised or re-mapped in translation are still rare. Building on an exploratory study carried out at our institute, in which findings from translation process data suggest that experience and/or training appears to be a main factor in handling conceptual metaphor, we present some salient features of re-mapping metaphor. Triangulating data from target-text products, keystroke logs and retrospective verbal commentaries collected under very similar conditions in a laboratory setting, we analyse how translators at different levels of experience handle two complex conceptual metaphors. The results appear to suggest that complex metaphor might indeed be culturespecific. They also potentially indicate that re-mapping practices are a function of experience and that re-mapping to a source-language target domain could create more uncertainty than generic-level re-mapping. Both findings hold pedagogical implications, which are discussed together with some methodological issues.

The parallels between writing research and translation process research range from the objects of study (text producers and texts) to the methods employed in investigating them. Similarly to writing research translation studies has moved over the last two decades from an almost exclusive focus on products towards considering workplace and cognitive processes and the effects of those processes on the quality of products. In this paper we outline how the methods common to both fields can be applied to the investigation of translators’ understanding of their roles and responsibilities as text producers and their treatment of the specific problem of title translation. The data are drawn from a corpus built up in a longitudinal research project about the relationship of translation competence and the translation process. The multi method approach we use combines techniques such as keystroke logging screen recording retrospection and interviews. It allows us to monitor translators at their workplace in as controlled and non invasive a manner as possible. It also provides rich data that make it possible to infer the practices and metalinguistic awareness that characterize the translation competence of translators with different levels of experience.

Information literacy has been implicitly recognized as a key aspect of translation competence in various theoretical models of translation competence (e.g. Göpferich 2008; PACTE 2008; Risku 1998). However, researchers have only recently begun to systematically examine information behaviour in the translation processes of students and professionals to determine how information literacy develops (e.g. White et al. 2008). The questions of how and whether translators use the multitude of electronic and non-electronic resources at their disposal and of how novices and professionals differ in this regard remain to be investigated in detail. The multi-method approach that we use to analyse translation competence and information behaviour combines data from ethnographic observation of the translation situation, surveys and semi-structured interviews to determine self-reported practices, keystroke logging, screenshot recordings of everything that happens on the computer screen, cue-based retrospective verbalizations of recorded translation processes as well as additional techniques such as eye-tracking. This combination of techniques in our approach opens a window onto the mind of translators and releases hidden expert knowledge, allowing inferences to be made about the practices and strategies that guide translation processes, considerations translators might make, and the awareness translators have of what they are doing.