Pauses by Student and Professional Translators in Translation Process

Abstract

Translation as a process of meaning making activity requires a cognitive process one of which is realized in a pause, a temporary stop or a break indicating doing other than typing activities in a certain period of translation process. Scholars agree that pauses are an indicator of cognitive process without which there will never be any translation practices. Despite such agreement, pauses are debatable as well, either in terms of their length or in terms of the activities managed by a translator while taking pauses. This study, in particular, aims at finding out how student translators and professional translators managed the pauses in a translation process. This was a descriptive research taking two student translators and two professional translators as the participants who were asked to translate a text from English into bahasa Indonesia. The source text (ST) was a historical recount text entitled ‘Early History of Yellowstone National Park’ downloaded from http://www.nezperce.com/yelpark9.html composed of 230-word long from English into bahasa Indonesia. The data were collected using Translog protocols, think aloud protocols (TAPs) and screen recording. Based on the data analysis, it was found that student translators took the longest pauses in the drafting phase spent to solve the problems related to finding out the right equivalent for the ST words or terms and to solve the difficulties encountered in encoding their ST understanding in the TL; meanwhile, professional translators took the longest pauses in the pos-drafting phase spent to ensure whether their TT had been natural and whether their TT had corresponded to the prevailing grammatical rules of the TL.

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