Jääskeläinen, R. (2010). Are all professionals experts?

Jääskeläinen, R. (2010). Are all professionals experts?. Translation and cognition, 15, 213-227.
Introduction
1. This paper will look at: some of the different ways of defining professionalism and expertise, and then some of the earlier findings in process studies will be reinterpreted from the point of view of expertise research. Finally, some implications for future research will be discussed.
Are all professionals experts?
1. One of the unexpected findings (of translation process studies) was that sometimes translation students or inexperienced bilinguals succeeded at the experimental task, while those deemed professional translators failed at it (e.g., Gerloff 1988; Jaaskelainen 1990, 1999).
2. The uncomfortable finding that professional translators do not always produce high-quality translations (e.g., Hiaskelainen 1999) has been attributed to the routineness problem. This is where the professional has applied a routine approach (learned in a particular domain) to a non-routine task.
3. Who is a professional and who is not? One of the possible answers to this question is quite pragmatic. Anyone who earns their living by translating is a professional translator.
4. Quality of performance is also central to definitions of expertise in cognitive psychology (see e.g., Chi et al. 1988; Ericsson et al. 2006). In the field of expertise studies, expertise has been defined as consistently superior performance in a domain (e.g., Ericsson 2006:3).
5. Siren and Hakkarainen (2002:75) suggest that when researching translation expertise, it is not sufficient to choose participants only on the basis of the length of their work experience. They argue that we also "need to know about the requirements and quality of their work."
6. In relation to translation, profeSSionals are often expected to have specializations in particular fields or domains
7. In sum, it seems obvious that if expertise is defined as "consistently superior performance;' not all professional translators can be experts. While it is highly likely that all experts are specialized, not all professionals are specialists either.
8. Thus, the concepts of professional, expert, and specialist intersect, but are yet distinct. Integrating and operationalizing these concepts in empirical studies is an important research priority.
Definitions of expertise
1. Translators can be assigned different labels, such as professional, expert, specialist, and generalist, and these labels may in some cases overlap.
2. Process studies should provide more details on the subjects' background, particularly when the focus of research is on expertise or professionalism (cf. Gopferich and J1iiiskeHiinen 2009).
3. At the most general level, expertise can be defined as "the possession of a large body of knowledge and procedural skill" (Chi et al. 1982:8).
4. According to Chi (2006: 21-23), expertise research can be divided into two approaches: (1) research into exceptional or absolute expertise, focused on chess masters, high level athletes, or other exceptionally talented or skilled individuals;and (2) research into relative expertise, focused on comparing the performance of novices and experts where it is assumed that novices can attain expertise
5. Experienced professional could be used to refer to those translators who have many years of experience and earn their living by translating, but who do not meet the criterion of "consistently superior performance."
6. Some definitions of expertise mention the requirement of at least ten years or 10,000 hours of experience (Chi et al. 1988), which is also known as the ten year-rule (e.g., Kellogg 2006).
7. However, not just any kind of experience will do. The development of expertise requires deliberate practice, meaning "regular engagement in specific activities directed at performance enhancement in a particular domain" (Shreve 2006:29).
8. Deliberate practice needs to meet certain criteria, including appropriate difficulty and informative feedback (Shreve 2006).
9. The quality of work experience is also seldom reported, with the exception of the translator's main fields of specialization (e.g.,Siren and Hakkarainen 2002; Englund Dimitrova 2005; Kunzli 2005).
10. On the whole, as suggested by Siren and Hakkarainen (2002), process studies should provide more details on the subjects' background, particularly when the focus of research is on expertise or profeSSionalism (cf. Gopferich and J1iiiskeHiinen 2009).
11. Expertise has also been viewed as a process (Bereiter and Scardamalia 1993), as a way of doing things rather than a quality someone possesses. This definition stems from research into expertise in writing (e.g., Bereiter and Scardamalia 1987).
12. Similarly. in translation process research it has been found that contrary to the assumed general automaticity ofprofessional translation, some ofthe most successful professionals engaged in more effortful processing activities than novices or unsuccessful professionals (e.g., Gerloff 1988; Krings 1988; JiiaskeHiinen 1999).
13. Routine experts are "skilful and efficient in applying acquired procedures and in working in familiar situations. Adaptive experts, in contrast, do not confine themselves to familiar problems, but are also able to solve novel problems and develop new conceptual understanding of their domain:' Hatano and Inagaki (1992, quoted in Tynjiila 2002: 35)
Domain specificity
1. Expertise studies have long established that although experts excel in their own domains (e.g., Glaser and Chi 1988; Ericsson 2006) because of the specific skills that arise during repeated practice, the expertise garnered there does not transfer readily outside the domain.
2. Consequently, with respect to professional translators producing low quality results, it may simply be that the experimental translation tasks have fallen outside the professional subjects' domains. The skills they learned in their domains of practice simply were not efficacious in the experimental domain.
3. In terms of domain-specificity,it is also interesting that even texts that have been chosen to represent generalist texts may turn out to require specialized knowledge, as is the case with the source text dealing with football in Jakobsen (2005: 177).
4. It is possible that the failed professional's work history reflects routine expertise, while the self-employed freelancers are more likely to be adaptive experts.
Automated processing
1. As a cognitive task, translation would seem to bear a closer resemblance to writing rather than to playing chess or tennis, thus, the finding that experts spend more time and effort on their task performance than non-experts seems significant and merits further attention in translation process research.
2. In other words, as some processing becomes more automatic, the expert is freed to spend more time (e.g., "work harder") resolving other difficulties and issues that arise in the task.
Segmentation and the knowledge-base
1. One of the features typical of expert processing is that experts tend to larger chunks (of strategy, of information, oflanguage) than novices Glaser and Chi 1988).
2. In translation process research, there is evidence that professionals can work with larger units or segments of text. They also take into account the whole text and pay attention to external factors such as the needs of the prospective readers of their translation.
3. Novices and naive subjects,in particular, tend to stick to the level of individual words and their equivalents.
4. Professional translators seem to have a more global idea of the communication situation, which they may use to create a global strategy for the translation task at hand.
5. Professional translators also exploit their world and cultural knowledge to a much larger extent than novices, who may be blinded by the words and end up with nonsensical translations (see e.g., Tirkkonen-Condit 1992).
6. Novices are usually much younger than profeSSionals,but this may also occur with subject specialists in the same age group, who may have all the factual knowledge at their disposal, but who, without the instrumental competence in translation (e.g., PACTE 2009; Gopferich 2008; Gopferich and Jiiiiskelainen 2009), allow themselves to be side-tracked by the "equivalents" offered by bilingual dictionaries.
7. Jakobsen (2005) shows that the experts' potential for superior speed allows instances of peak performance,realized as, e.g., longer segments of continuous text production. (Translog)...Of course, the idea of superior performance requires that these longer segments also meet criteria of quality.
8. On the other hand, there is evidence that the sentence-length target text production imposed by translation memory systems may disturb professional translators who may have learned to work with larger chunks of text (Dragsted 2005). This raises the interesting prospect that the use of translation tools may in some way degrade expert performance while "boosting" that of non-experts and novices.
Self-monitoring skill
1. Expertise research shows that experts have strong self-monitoring skills (e.g., Glaser and Chi 1988).
2. In Laukkanen (1993), the professional subject made more negative evaluations of both her own performance as well of her provisional solutions while performing a non-routine task than when performing a routine task.
Where experts fail
1. Chi (2006) lists some of the shortcomings of expert performance, such as inflexibility, over-confidence, or bias.
Implications for further research
1. Expertise research might be able to provide a theoretical backbone which would help create a more comprehensive and reliable picture of what constitutes expertise and expert performance in translation and make sense of the sometimes frustratingly contradictory findings about professional translators' processing.
2. Looking at translation processes from the point of view of expertise research has both methodological and didactic implications.
3. Future research projects designed to examine the ways in which expert translators excel in their own domains would be most welcome.
4. dissecting the concept of expertise also serves translator training purposes.
5. We cannot expect all of our graduates to become experts in the absolute sense (Chi 2006), but we can expect them to become experts in the sense of possessing a large knowledge-base and a great deal of procedural knowledge. We can expect them to pursue their careers as either routine or adaptive experts in the sense Hatano and Inagaki (1992) proposed.
6. Raising the aim of our training to the level of producing and valuing only the exceptionally gifted would simply serve to undermine our graduates' confidence and self-esteem. It would also most certainly be quite unrealistic.