Does translation involve structural priming?

ABSTRACT

When asked to translate utterances, people might merely make sure that their translations have the same meaning as the source, but they might also maintain aspects of sentence form across languages. We report two experiments in which English–German and German–English bilinguals (without specialist translator training) repeated German ditransitive sentences whose meaning was compatible with more than one grammatical form or translated them into English. Participants almost invariably repeated the sentences accurately, thereby retaining the grammatical structure. Importantly, Experiment 1 found that they tended to repeat grammatical form across languages. Experiment 2 included a condition with sentences that had no grammatical equivalent form in English; here participants tended to persist in the order of thematic roles. We argue that cross-linguistic structural priming plays a major role in the act of translation.

KEYWORDS:

• Structural priming
• Translation
• On-line processing
• Cross-linguistic priming
• Ditransitive constructions

Acknowledgements

A subset of the data in Experiment 2 is published and discussed with particular focus on concerns of translation and interpreting research in Maier (2011). Experiment 1 and discussions of results in terms of their psycholinguistic relevance have not been published before.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Funding information: The research reported in this article is part of the first author's unpublished 2009 PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh and was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) [grant number PTA-040-2004-000712].