Reviewed by José Mateo, University of Alicante

In 1997, Joseph H. Danks, Gregory M. Shreve, Stephen B. Fountain, and Michael K. McBeath published a volume devoted to the cognitive processes involved in translation and interpreting. In those years, translation studies had started to diversify and address new theoretical and methodological approaches, crossing the threshold of language and addressing new perspectives such as communication, interculturality, or, as was the case at hand, cognition.

Thirteen years later, Gregory M. Shreve and Erik Angelone have published this new work which, as they claim, reviews what seems to have been an explosion of cognition-based translation studies. Although certain lines of research that looked promising in 1997 have led to an impasse today, others which were incipient then are now thriving, as this book shows well. The book is divided into three parts: methodological innovation, research design and research issues, and integration of the translation process and cognitive sciences research.

The first part opens with Erik Angelone’s study on screen-recording and think-aloud protocols to understand translators’ problem-solving behaviors. Contributions by Barbara Dragsted; by Gregory M. Shreve, Elizabeth Lacruz, and Erik Angelone; and by Antin Fougner Rydning and Christian Lachaud approach the issue of keystroke-logging and eye-tracking from three different pespectives: (i) the way translators coordinate source language comprehension and target language production; (ii) the effects of syntactic difficulty on cognitive effort in sight translation; and (iii) the impact of context and translating skills on the comprehension and reformulation of polysemous words. Fabio Alves, Erich Steiner, Stella Neumann, Silvia Hansen-Schirra, and Adriana Pagano’s work integrates product-and process-based translation with the use of annotated translation corpora, keystroke-logging and eye-tracking, and retrospective verbalizations. Finally, Sharon O’Brien investigates the use of eye-tracking in controlled language and readability applied to machine translation and computer-assisted translation tool design.

The second part of the book opens with Ricardo Muñoz Martín’s description of a functionalist, cognitive translatology framework, and a set of principles necessary for translation process research. Gyde Hansen offers a cautious view of the application of empirical models to research process and advocates for combining empirical science and the liberal arts methodologies to the different translation processes. Finally, Riitta Jääskeläinen approaches the issue of expertise in professional and amateur translators.

In the final part of the book, K. Anders Ericsson advocates the integration of cognitive science concepts into translation and interpretation research. Barbara Moser-Mercer focuses on the cognitive processes involved in the acquisition of interpreting expertise. Bruce J. Diamond and Gregory M. Shreve aim to integrate translation process research and recent neurological and physiological findings. Erik Angelone’s chapter on uncertainty management nurtures on the concept of metacognition originally used in previous studies of cognition and learning. The interdisciplinary approach of Maxim I. Stamenov, Alexander Gerganov, and Ivo D. Popivanov applies psychological priming techniques to the bilingual lexicons accessed in translation. The book closes with Sandra L. Halverson’s defense of the relationship between translation process research and advances in cognitive science.