Tapping into the process of literary text translation: An exploratory study. 2017.

Abstract

This senior thesis taps into the translation process of a literary text and analyses some features of the final products as provided by two different groups of participants under experimental conditions, namely: three undergraduate Translation students from Federal University of Uberlandia, and three English Instructors that allegedly know and appreciate J. R. R. Tolkien’s work. The objectives were to analyse the difference in the cognitive process between the two types of participants, by means of task duration, orientation, drafting, revision, segmentation, pause, micro translation unit, recursiveness, and meta-reflection, and to assess the solutions the participants provided to some linguistic features in the source text. Key logging and eye tracking were used as methods to collect and analyse data. The results point out that the English instructors had a more expert-like behaviour, and it took them less cognitive effort to perform the translation task, while the Translation students used linguistic features that were more representative of the source text and similar to a previous published translation into Brazilian Portuguese by R. E. Kyrmse. This research contributes to enlarging the still incipient body of knowledge of the cognitive processes of literary translation, and suggests a need for enhancing practice on the translation of literary texts in an undergraduate program in translation.