Translation As a Mental Activity: From Psycholinguistics to Neurolinguistics

摘要

This paper investigates translation as a process in the mind of the translator. It also explores the kinds of processing in the translator's mind such as perception and text production. Empirical psycholinguistic studies on the process of translation were focusing on means such as think-aloud protocols which mainly focus on translation strategies in one way or another but apart from exploring the neuro-linguistic aspects of this process such as cognitive and brain imaging research. From the term "neuro-linguistic" one can relate neurological process in the human brain with language system. The paper tries to boost up neurol-inguistic research in translation studies in the future: translation studies can and needs to have biologically-oriented basis in the future starting from exploring the role of the translator's mind to the biological diagnosis of the human gene to recognize the different ways of communication. The paper claims that there is a gap between neuro-linguistic studies in translation and psycholinguistic studies. This study tries to attract the attention towards the neuro-linguistic issues as a contribution in translation studies.