ABSTRACT

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The translation process research has developed as one part of translatology since 1980. In the very first empirical investigation of this sub-discipline, a data corpus was used to find out what is really happening in the brains of translators while translating. Since then, this independent, process-oriented research has established itself as a dynamic research area on a psycholinguistic or cognitive-linguistic basis. Interesting research results for numerous questions have been achieved through the establishment of translation process research in recent years. In these studies, the method “eye tracking” was applied. Because of the results, we now know much more about translation process research compared to thirty years ago. However, despite the progress of research, there are still many questions that need to be examined and answered. In particular, language-comparative studies for the translation of language pairs, (e.g. similar language system vs. distant language system: German-English vs. German-Korean), have not been yet carried out sufficiently.

The abovementioned language pairs do not only have different syntactic sentence structures, but also cultural differences which are reflected in language systems.

In this presentation, I will begin with the general theory of translational process research and then I will introduce "eye tracking" as one of the relevant methods of translation process research, referring to current experiments using eye tracking in the area of translation studies as an example. I will then deal with the differences between German, Korean and English in relation to the attributive relative clause. After that, by means of appropriate insights, I’m going to explain how these differences between the three languages affect translation. In the course of this, I will also highlight syntactic difficulties and influences of cultural differences which are reflected in language systems while translating.    

In addition, I will attempt to present how the current experiments were carried out by means of eye tracking (ten Korean subjects and ten English subjects translate the same triple texts, from German to Korean and from German to English). The first result indicates that there is a direct correlation between different sentence structures and translation difficulties.