Translation, cognition, and other mishaps

Abstract

I reconstruct my scholarly trajectory as a way of making sense of the emergence of cognitive translation and interpreting studies as a domain, and of cognitive transla-tology as a framework within it. Work as a translator and early studies on language variation gradually opened into empirical research on translators’ behavior and expertise. Linguistic models proved insufficient and yielded to perspectives ground-ed in situated cognition, in which embodiment, environment, and task conditions shape translation activity, and eventually expand toward multimodal, multitask, and increasingly technological forms of professional and non-professional communica-tion alike. Translator training, researcher training, and research methods remained tightly intertwined over decades, under institutional constraints that both support and distort them. The resulting view frames cognitive translatology as a moving tar-get rather than a settled domain, defined less by boundaries than by its attempts to understand multilectal mediated communication.