Empirical Translation Process Research: Past and Possible Future Perspectives

By the mid-1980s a branch in of this field now often referred to as Cognitive Translation Studies (CTS, or more recently CTIS, Cognitive Translation and Interpretation Studies) started to investigate and model how the translators' minds work -how translators create meaning, how they arrive at strategies and translation choices, how translation competence develops, how cultural and linguistic factors impact translated text, etc. (see, e.g., Risku 2012). Studies in this line of research "refer to and expand" (Risku 2012, 675) models of the mind as developed in Cognitive Science, to explain translators' behavior and translation processes. While the first attempts to study translation as a cognitive activity date back to the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Albir 2015, Muñoz 2017), Translation Process Research (TPR) is often said to To be published in Translation, Cognition and Behavior: "Translation and cognition in the 21st century: Goals met, goals ahead" begin in the 1980s with the analysis of thinking aloud protocols (TAP) and to investigate "What happens in the minds of translators" (Krings 1986; 2001; see also Königs 1987) and to assess "by what observable and presumed mental processes do translators arrive at their translations?"