Second Language Students' Revision During Translating Medical and Literary Texts: A Psycholinguistics Perspective

Introduction. Cognitive processes have been extensively examined in the literature of translation studies to identify what goes on in students’ minds when they translate from one language into another. Such investigations targeted translators’ pauses over different texts from their native language into a foreign language. However, identifying translators’ revisions of different types of text remains sufficiently unexplored in the translation studies literature. Goals. This paper attempts to examine Arab students’ translation behaviors (self-revision or self-correction in particular) during the translation of a text from their second language (English) into their first language (Arabic) and vice versa. It also aims to reveal how revising a translated text is moderated by the variety of directionality and text type. To this end, 27 Arab native students were asked to translate two types of texts: literary and medical texts from English into Arabic and from Arabic into English over a keystroke logging program (Inputlog). Their behaviors were video-recorded using a video screenshot program. After translation, four students were invited to take a stimulated recall interview by viewing their behaviors in the video and were requested to verbalize what they were thinking of when they deleted and/or inserted text during translation assignments. Results. The results from the quantitative analysis showed that text type and L1-L2 directionality have significant effects on students’ cognitive processes. In addition, qualitative analyses obtained from MAXQDA revealed that students' translators encountered difficulties in many areas such as creativity-demanding problems, lexical problems, comprehensibility problems, spelling problems (for only Arabic-English directionality), and syntactic problems.   Conclusion. Many cognitive process difficulties were identified which were related to psycholinguistics issues that need to be tackled in the translation studies.