Grounding translation and interpreting in the brain: what has been, can be, and must be done

ABSTRACT

This paper offers an overview of neurocognitive research on translation and interpreting, an area whose history spans almost 100 years. First, we identify the main milestones in the development of this field, considering empirical breakthroughs (based on neuropsychological and neuroscientific evidence) as well as theoretical and institutional advances. Second, we review three areas of inquiry for which abundant evidence is already available, namely: (i) the circuits involved in backward and forward translation, (ii) the mechanisms engaged depending on variables of the translation unit, and (iii) the neurocognitive impact of expertise in simultaneous interpreting. Third, we discuss the field’s prospects for development, identifying key possibilities and methodological limitations. Finally, we enumerate the principal requirements for the consolidation of the neurocognitive approach (e.g. interdisciplinary training, greater collaboration between translation studies scholars and neuroscientists, increased funding, and presence in high-impact journals). In sum, we intend to show that knowledge about the cerebral basis of translation and interpreting has been growing over the decades and that conditions are appropriate for this promising space to assert itself as a full-fledged research arena.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation studies
• cognitive neuroscience
• translation directionality
• translation units
• interpreting expertise
• interdisciplinary research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Edinson Muñoz is a professor and Japanese-Spanish Translator. He is currently the Director of the Translation Studies Program, with concentration in English-Japanese/ English-Portuguese at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile, where he teaches Japanese-Spanish Contrastive Grammar, Reading Comprehension in Japanese and Japanese Graphemics. He has also supervised undergraduate theses on those topics. His research work deals with cognitive linguistics, neurolinguistics and translation.

Noelia Calvo is a Ph.D. student at the National University of Córdoba and a doctoral fellow of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (Argentina). She obtained her bachelor degree in English at the National University of San Juan. She is currently conducting her doctoral research at the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience. She collaborates with the Cognitive Psychology of Language Research Group and the Laboratory of Cognitive Psychology (School of Psychology). She is also a teaching assistant at the Institute of Philosophy in the field of English Philology.

Adolfo M. García serves as Scientific Director of the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience, Assistant Researcher at CONICET, and Professor of Neurolinguistics at the Faculty of Education of UNCuyo. He is also associate editor for the Journal of World Languages. He has over 120 publications, including books, chapters, and articles in leading journals on neuroscience, language, and translation. His distinctions include the Most Outstanding Paper Award (Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States, 2013) and the Young Investigator Award (Argentine Association of Behavioral Science, 2015).

ORCID

Adolfo M. García http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6936-0114

Notes

1. See, for example, the work of García and Ibáñez (2016) on systemic functional linguistics.

2. Alternating antagonism is a specific pattern of restitution in bilingual aphasia, whereby patients can speak only one language for a given time period, with the available language (i.e., L1 or L2) alternating for consecutive periods (Paradis et al., 1982).

3. In this work, Paradis reviewed all four translation disorders through an exhaustive analysis of recovery patterns of the different languages of polyglot aphasics, proposing that specific mechanisms within L1 and L2 systems are neurofunctionally independent.

4. For more comprehensive views on the interdisciplinary nature of translation studies, see Snell-Hornby (2006).

5. Still, this is a limitation facing every other approach within translation studies.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the CONICET; CONICYT/FONDECYT Regular under Grant 1170010; Programa Interdisciplinario de Investigación Experimental en Comunicación y Cognición (PIIECC), Facultad de Humanidades, USACH; Proyecto Basal USACH under Grant USA1398_ME112214; and the INECO Foundation.