Stepping into others’ shoes: a cognitive perspective on target audience orientation in written translation

Abstract

This paper suggests what might allow translators to orient themselves towards their target audience in the translation process. To shed light on translators' ability to put themselves into their target audience' s shoes, I adopt a cognitive perspective by drawing on current findings from psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience. I depart from the notion of target audience as applied to written translation. Aspects to this concept and the terminology of audience in translation studies are briefly discussed. Then I turn to translation process research to examine two empirical studies and one theoretical paper for insights into researching translators' target audience orientation. Next, I introduce concepts from social cognition research that might contribute to give a cognitive account of translators' behavior towards the target audience. I then touch upon the relation of the functional neurocognitive network presumably supporting target audience orientation with other neurocognitive networks that seem particularly relevant to translation. As a complement, I present a research design for empirically verifying my claim about what enables translators' target audience orientation, and gaining further insight into the relations between target audience orientation, translation process and translation product. Finally, some conclusions about the benefits of this type of research are offered.

Translation and the double bind of imaginative resistance

“…Although there is currently no empirical research that might provide answers to these questions, one might speculate that translators' engagement with texts as both intimate readers and rewriters could render their experience of the phenomenon of imaginative resistance particularly difficult and, thus, worthy of investigation. This is therefore another research avenue for the interdisciplinary field of process-oriented translation studies, sometimes referred to as translation psychology or translation process research (Holmes 1988;Jääskeläinen 2012;Apfelthaler 2014). Alice Kaplan (2013, 67) notes that "while there are many theories of translation, very little has been written about the everyday psychology of translating".…”

The Importance of Emotional Intelligence Skills for Translators

“…Other emotion-related individual differences, such as empathy (Apfelthaler, 2014), self-efficacy (Bolaños-Medina, 2014), emotion regulation (Rojo & Ramos-Caro, 2018), and ambiguity tolerance (Rosiers & Eyckmans, 2017) have been mooted to differentially impact various aspects of a translator's work, such as target reader orientation, documentation abilities, accuracy, speed of decision-making, coping with terminology, and resourcefulness. Together, these studies have started to show that the affective profiles of translators can sometimes be more important than their language skills in terms of shaping translations.…”