Asymmetry and automaticity in translation

This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to integrate insights from cognitive psychology and Cognitive Linguistics into translational inquiry by modeling the translator's operations as alternating between System 1 and System 2 thinking. We analyze trainee output to investigate translatorial decision-making in scenarios employing instances of basic cross-linguistic asymmetry in the partitioning of conceptual material. The objective is to better understand the role that automaticity plays in those contexts: how pronounced it is, how it influences translation output, and to what extent the skill of monitoring it can be regarded a component of translation competence. The study also tests, in one condition, whether the translator trainer can induce System 2 processing in trainees by issuing extra pre-task instruction, thereby helping optimize their performance.