Our method of questioning. Session 7 - Directions for Research

Résumé En

Interdisciplinary research has now been for a long time the buzz word in translation studies. Translation scholars get more and more interested in psycholinguistics, cognitive sciences and the neurological bases for the unique capacity that allows us to transfer meaning from one language to another. The question, however, is: Do Translation Studies really provide us with the sufficient fundamentals in order to construct an empirical methodology on them? Some research is still trying to make translation a research subject of other areas rather than developing a genuine research domain. Translation has a hard time emancipating from this role and using other disciplines' methodologies efficiently for its own purposes. Krings' statement that "research into the translation process is mostly occupied with generating hypotheses rather than testing hypotheses" is, although being made in 1986, still true.This paper advocates that it is high time to live up to the potentials of our questions. If we conceive translation as text engineering, we should have the same aspirations as engineers would have: the message we create should work AND we should be able to explain why-questions mere speculation cannot answer. Translation process research has done the first step towards filling the gap by integrating eye-tracking and key-logging methodology and by developing a sound tradition of triangulation (Hansen 2006). Among our sister discipline linguistics, pragmatics are now experiencing an empirical turn-a development translation studies could mirror (Noveck & Sperber 2004). http://webcast.in2p3.fr/videos-our_method_of_questioning