Contrastive Linguistics (CL), Translation Studies (TS) and Machine Translation (MT) have common grounds: They all work at the crossroad where two or more languages meet. Despite their inherent relatedness, methodological exchange between the three disciplines is rare. This special issue touches upon areas where the three fields converge. It results directly from a workshop at the 2011 German Association for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics (GSCL) conference in Hamburg where researchers from the three fields presented and discussed their interdisciplinary work. While the studies contained in this volume draw from a wide variety of objectives and methods, and various areas of overlaps between CL, TS and MT are addressed, the volume is by no means exhaustive with regard to this topic. Further cross-fertilisation is not only desirable, but almost mandatory in order to tackle future tasks and endeavours.}

Contrastive Linguistics (CL), Translation Studies (TS) and Machine Translation (MT) have common grounds: They all work at the crossroad where two or more languages meet. Despite their inherent relatedness, methodological exchange between the three disciplines is rare. This special issue touches upon areas where the three fields converge. It results directly from a workshop at the 2011 German Association for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics (GSCL) conference in Hamburg where researchers from the three fields presented and discussed their interdisciplinary work. While the studies contained in this volume draw from a wide variety of objectives and methods, and various areas of overlaps between CL, TS and MT are addressed, the volume is by no means exhaustive with regard to this topic. Further cross-fertilisation is not only desirable, but almost mandatory in order to tackle future tasks and endeavours, and this volume is committed to bringing these three fields even closer together.

Contrastive Linguistics (CL), Translation Studies (TS) and Machine Translation (MT) have common grounds: They all work at the crossroad where two or more languages meet. Despite their inherent relatedness, methodological exchange between the three disciplines is rare. This special issue touches upon areas where the three fields converge. It results directly from a workshop at the 2011 German Association for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics (GSCL) conference in Hamburg where researchers from the three fields presented and discussed their interdisciplinary work. While the studies contained in this volume draw from a wide variety of objectives and methods, and various areas of overlaps between CL, TS and MT are addressed, the volume is by no means exhaustive with regard to this topic. Further cross-fertilisation is not only desirable, but almost mandatory in order to tackle future tasks and endeavours, and this volume is committed to bringing these three fields even closer together. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Drawing on work from both eminent and emerging scholars in translation and interpreting studies, this collection offers a critical reflection on current methodological practices in these fields toward strengthening the theoretical and empirical ties between them. Methodological and technological advances have pushed these respective areas of study forward in the last few decades, but advanced tools, such as eye tracking and keystroke logging, and insights from their use have often remained in isolation and not shared across disciplines. This volume explores empirical and theoretical challenges across these areas and the subsequent methodologies implemented to address them and how they might be mutually applied across translation and interpreting studies but also brought together toward a coherent empirical theory of translation and interpreting studies. Organized around three key themes—target-text orientedness, source-text orientedness, and translator/interpreter-orientedness—the book takes stock of both studies of translation and interpreting corpora and processes in an effort to answer such key questions, including: how do written translation and interpreting relate to each other? How do technological advances in these fields shape process and product? What would an empirical theory of translation and interpreting studies look like? Taken together, the collection showcases the possibilities of further dialogue around methodological practices in translation and interpreting studies and will be of interest to students and scholars in these fields.

Cognitive aspects of the translation process have become central in Translation and Interpreting Studies in recent years, further establishing the field of Cognitive Translatology. Empirical and interdisciplinary studies investigating translation and interpreting processes promise a hitherto unprecedented predictive and explanatory power. This collection contains such studies which observe behaviour during translation and interpreting. The contributions cover a vast area and investigate behaviour during translation and interpreting – with a focus on training of future professionals, on language processing more generally, on the role of technology in the practice of translation and interpreting, on translation of multimodal media texts, on aspects of ergonomics and usability, on emotions, self-concept and psychological factors, and finally also on revision and post-editing. For the present publication, we selected a number of contributions presented at the Second International Congress on Translation, Interpreting and Cognition hosted by the Tra&Co Lab at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz.

Although the notion of meaning has always been at the core of translation, the invariance of meaning has, partly due to practical constraints, rarely been challenged in Corpus-based Translation Studies. In answer to this, the aim of this book is to question the invariance of meaning in translated texts: if translation scholars agree on the fact that translated language is different from non-translated language with respect to a number of grammatical and lexical aspects, would it be possible to identify differences between translated and non-translated language on the semantic level too? More specifically, this books tries to formulate an answer to the following three questions: (i) how can semantic differences in translated vs non-translated language be investigated in a corpus-based study?, (ii) are there any differences on the semantic level between translated and non-translated language? and (iii) if there are differences on the semantic level, can we ascribe them to any of the (universal) tendencies of translation? In this book, I establish a way to visually explore semantic similarity on the basis of representations of translated and non-translated semantic fields. A technique for the comparison of semantic fields of translated and non-translated language called SMM++ (based on Helge Dyvik’s Semantic Mirrors method) is developed, yielding statistics-based visualizations of semantic fields. The SMM++ is presented via the case of inchoativity in Dutch (beginnen [to begin]). By comparing the visualizations of the semantic fields on different levels (translated Dutch with French as a source language, with English as a source language and non-translated Dutch) I further explore whether the differences between translated and non-translated fields of inchoativity in Dutch can be linked to any of the well-known universals of translation. The main results of this study are explained on the basis of two cognitively inspired frameworks: Halverson’s Gravitational Pull Hypothesis and Paradis’ neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism.

Exchange between the translation studies and the computational linguistics communities has traditionally not been very intense. Among other things, this is reflected by the different views on parallel corpora. While computational linguistics does not always strictly pay attention to the translation direction (e.g. when translation rules are extracted from (sub)corpora which actually only consist of translations), translation studies are amongst other things concerned with exactly comparing source and target texts (e.g. to draw conclusions on interference and standardization effects). However, there has recently been more exchange between the two fields – especially when it comes to the annotation of parallel corpora. This special issue brings together the different research perspectives. Its contributions show – from both perspectives – how the communities have come to interact in recent years.