Discourse analysis, as an approach to text, provides the teacher, student, and professional translator with resources for achieving objectivity and for making and justifying translation decisions. It offers a strategy for relating the problems and processes and discourse and the specific concerns to the objectives of the translator. It can be…

Translators must understand what they translate, but oral language is generally more redundant than written language and the translator need not repeat everything he hears. One method of teaching this skill is to have students sight translate a text in its entirety and then abridge it to its minimum informative content. Abstracting and compressing…

This paper explores the issue of unconscious manipulation in translation. The translator engages in creating new text subject to the principles of totality and part-whole relations. The closer the parts and relations to those of the source text (ST), the more related this new whole will be to the former one. In attempting to preserve ST semantic…

This paper discusses factors contributing to differing translations of the same source text, arguing that translation occurs on a continuum rather than having absolute criteria and procedures. Issues examined include the formal properties of the text, the text's "invariant core of meaning," stability in the semantic elements of the text, the text…

Describes Translation Quality Assessment (TQA), an approach to evaluating translation that incorporates aspects of textlinguistic, pragmatic, and discourse models of translation and focuses on text as a communicative occurrence, within a specific context, rather than a series of words and grammatical structures. A functionalist approach to…

Students arriving in the language department at Heriot-Watt University (Scotland) who study two languages arrive deficient in both languages and often in English as well. Generally, students have little knowledge of current and international affairs or the history and culture of the countries whose languages they are learning. However, they…

Impromptu speech is heard only once, at a rate of perception that depends on the speaker's delivery, and is specifically adapted to the listeners. These features trigger cognitive activities that facilitate translation. Impromptu speech is characterized by a constant interconnection between cognitive competence and language competence and between…

Compares the cognitive processing of 12 anglophone French students who wrote an argumentative text in their first language (English) and second language (L2) (French). Results indicate that the writers' strategic knowledge and capacity for meaningful multiple-level discourse processing explains the constraining effects of linguistic processing on…

A study of simultaneous interpretation from Japanese to English focused on problems inherent in simultaneous language processing. Data were drawn from a discussion session at an international conference of physicians concerning nuclear war. Transcription of the Japanese source text (romanized), English product, and a gloss of lexical equivalents…

Essays in applied linguistics presented in this annual review include: "Learner Autonomy: Some Steps in the Evolution of Theory and Practice" (David Little); "An Investigation of the Mental Lexicon of Second Language Learners" (Elizabeth O'Gorman); "Strategies for Identifying Terms in Specialised Texts" (Jennifer Pearson); "Inferencing and the…