Models of the Translation Process
Michaël Carl, Moritz Jonas Schaeffer · 2017
This chapter tracks the development of translation models from the late 1940s to the beginning of this century. Models of the translation process have been developed within computational linguistics (CL) for machine translation (MT) and within translation studies (TS) to model the process of human translation (HT). It points out the similarities and differences between these translation models, and suggests future avenues for the development of computational models of the translation process. The chapter discusses a number of translation models that incorporate elements from a wide range of theories from cognitive, communication, and social sciences. Those models constitute a large inventory of translation-relevant qualities, but are not yet ready for rigorous quantitative assessment. The chapter also briefly traces the history of empirical investigations into the translation process, starting from think-aloud protocols (TAPs) in the 1990s, over corpus analyses, to more recent techniques of eye tracking and keylogging.