Bilingualism and translation

The anthropological acceptance of translation practice both as a profession and as a form of brain functioning built on a specific cognitive architecture has been “a tortuous road up the mountain”. The trend, during many years and both in research and within the professional domain, has been to consider translators as proficient bilinguals who, for different reasons, engage in activities somehow related to meaning transfer. Neuroscience and cognitive psychology undoubtedly confirm that there are substantial differences in the way translators and bilinguals tackle their bilingualism. Bilingualism results from the interaction of different factors, such as L2 usage in the environment (Green & Abutalebi 2013); it is dynamic in nature, and there are several factors that do exert an impact on what has been defined as The Bilingual Advantage (e.g., Luk & Bialystok 2013). By consequence, the idea of Translation Expertise (e.g., Muñoz Martín 2009) as an independent, modulating factor is well worth of consideration and justifies the comparison to other forms of bilingualism. It has been extensively shown that expertise in translation transfers to other domains, and that this transfer is related to the cognitive processes triggered to perform translation tasks. Therefore, bilinguals and translators handle differently their languages and the cognitive regulation of resources due to consistent practice in their specific domain.

At the light of the most updated psychological research, the present work will provide a comprehensive overview of bilingualism as a dynamic construct, focusing on how the cognitive architecture underlying performance in handling several languages is shaped differentially by professional expertise and bilingualism. Namely, this chapter aims at identifying the locus of the cognitive differences that have been detected so far between bilinguals and translators, with a special emphasis on the tasks that have revealed a differential triggering and use of their cognitive resources. Our final goal is to reach a thorough understanding of how a varying interaction of bilingualism with the environment is responsible for an adaptive cognitive restructuring of the processes that allow to cope with specific linguistic and translation tasks.