Priming Translation: Cognitive, Affective, and Social Factors

This innovative volume builds on Michael S. Gazzaniga’s Interpreter Theory toward radically expanding the theoretical and methodological scope of translational priming research.

Gazzaniga’s Interpreter Theory, based on empirical studies carried out with split-brain patients, argues for the Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI), a module in the brain’s left hemisphere that seeks to make sense of their world based on available evidence--and, where no evidence is available, primed by past memories, confabulates coherence. The volume unpacks this idea in translation research to test whether translators are primed to confabulate by the LBI in their own work. Robinson investigates existing empirical research to test hypotheses on the translational links between the LBI and cognitive priming, the Right-Brain Interpreter and affective priming, and the Collective Full-Brain Interpreter and social priming. Taken together, the book seeks to open translational priming studies up to the full range of cognitive, affective, and social primes and to prime cognitive translation researchers to implement this broader dynamic in future research.

This book will be of interest to scholars in translation and interpreting studies, especially those working in cognitive translation and interpreting studies.

Douglas Robinson is Professor of Translation Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. His recent Routledge books on translation include The Behavioral Economics of Translation and Translation as a Form: A Centennial Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s ＂The Task of the Translator＂.