1. Tirkkonen-Condit, Sonja. 2001. “Uncertainty in Translation Processes.” Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit and Riitta Jääskeläinen, eds. Tapping and Mapping the Processes of Translation and Interpreting. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  2. Introduction
    1. The purpose of this paper is to show how uncertainty manifests itself in translation processes and to argue that translators might in fact have identifiable patterns of uncertainty management.
    2. Uncertainty management could be regarded as a dimension of translation strategies as defined by Andrew Chesterman (1997 and 1998). Chesterman looks at translation as an action with a goal; translation strategies boil down to a management of means and goals.
    3. The potential for ambiguity is also an inherent feature of translating, and thus it seems reasonable to expect that this shows in translation processes as uncertainty.
    4. If it turns out that uncertainty phenomena are not arbitrary but instead manifest some regular patterns, then it might make sense even to talk about uncertainty management as a dimension of translation strategies.
  3. Materials
    1. My preliminary analysis covered 20 think-aloud protocols (TAPs) originating from four experiments conducted by Tirkkonen-Condit, Jääskeläinen, and Pöntinen and Romanov at Savonlinna in the late 1980's and early 1990's. The subjects in these experiments represented various levels of translational proficiency.
    2. For my present paper, however, I confined my analysis to protocols which represented high-quality professional performance. Therefore I chose from the material six translators' protocols for a close analysis.
    3. Two of these translators performed a translation task from Finnish into English in Tirkkonen-Condit's experiment in 1992, whereas four translators translated from English into Finnish in Jääskeläinen's experiment in 1987-88. Both experiments had a realistic translation brief, and the experimental conditions had a close resemblance to the subjects' real-life working conditions.
  4. Method of Analysis
    1. I will identify particular processing phenomena in the six translators' protocols as well as the uncertainty phenomena which seem to appear in connection with the processing phenomena.
    2. I will describe how uncertainty is attached to the identified processing phenomena.
    3. I will sketch translator profiles designed to reveal individual and shared patterns of uncertainty management.
  5. Processes and Uncertainty
    1. My coding of processing and uncertainty phenomena in the think-aloud protocols is based on two assumptions: First, that translation is goal-oriented action and can therefore be described as problem-solving and second, that coding must be based on verbalised data.
    2. My analysis of processing and uncertainty has the aim of revealing how goals and means are reconciled in the individual problem-solving instances which account for the ultimate target text generation, and how uncertainty phenomena are attached to these instances.
    3. The translator's goal is to produce a target text, and the cognitive means to achieve this goal are here referred to as processing phenomena.
    4. Processing phenomena:
      1. Pivotal processing phenomena
        1. PROBLEM, TENTATIVE SOLUTION, SOLUTION, AUTOMATIC, EVALUATION and POSTPONE.
      2. Auxiliary processing phenomena
        1. Rephrase ST, Explain ST (auxiliaries to Tentative Solution); Audition (auxiliary to Evaluation); Endorse (auxiliary to Solution); Justify (auxiliary to Evaluation, Solution, Tentative Solution and Automatic; ST, TT and Dictionary (auxiliaries to any processing phenomenon).
    5. Uncertainty phenomena
      1. I have described the uncertainty phenomena in terms of their linguistic manifestations and noticed that they contain expressions of epistemic and deontic modality, hedges on quality and quantity, questions, hypothetical statements, references to ignorance, uncertainty, etc.
      2. My analysis shows that uncertainty can appear in connection with any of the processing phenomena. In fact the uncertainty phenomena often function as verbalised signals of a particular processing phenomenon.
  6. Conclusion
    1. What seems to be shared by the translators is the production of tentative solutions.
    2. The alternative ways to handle these are the following: to ponder on each tentative solution in turn; to produce justifications or endorsements; to subject them to audition; or to postpone them. These patterns appear to some extent in all of the six protocols, but the tendencies to favour one or the other vary.
    3. Thus the mere fact that a translator is prepared to postpone a solution or to produce several tentative solutions without endorsing any one of them as a final solution shows that he or she can tolerate a situation in which a decision is pending for the time being
    4. Similarly, when a translator verbalises ignorance or uncertainty in response to a problem situation, this verbalisation serves as a marker of a processing phenomenon (i.e. problem) and as a marker of uncertainty.
    5. I hope that by doing so I have been able to give empirical support to the claim that translating, like many other cognitive tasks which require human decision-making, is riddled with potential ambiguity. Thus tolerance of ambiguity is a personality feature which might deserve some attention in the education and recruitment of translators.
  7. Ahmad Al-Khatib (2018) Ph.D. Fellow The Institute for Applied Linguistics Kent State University