Mistranslations in the Context of Cognitive Retention of Force Dynamics in Translation

Abstract

This paper reports on part of ongoing PhD research, which concentrates on the retention of Talmy’s (2000) force-dynamics schemas in translation and on the existing evidence on dissociating linguistic and cognitive levels of translation description (cognitive retention hypothesis put forward by Mäkisalo and Lehtinen, 2014). The matter is studied quantitatively and qualitatively on trilingual bidirectional corpora of phrases containing simple and complex verb phrases with force-dynamics patterns from fragments of literary and audiovisual texts in different translation pairs combining English, Polish and Finnish; with translations from Finnish into English and Polish being in the very focus of this paper.

Interesting cases of mistranslations found in the verb phrases from the self-compiled literary corpora triggered the need for a separate analysis of such inadequate translation cases that would account for their specific cognitive nature, but also their impact and consequences on distorting the force-dynamics event scenarios found in the studied texts. The issue raised in this paper complements Mäkisalo and Lehtinen’s cognitive retention hypothesis, since mistranslations were not considered in the methodological assumptions of their framework. The analysis of mistranslations in the context of cognitive retention of force-dynamics structural patterns constitutes an interesting perspective for translation training (not translation-quality assessment), by providing evidence for embodied cognitive processes of re-conceptualisation in translation, as well as the dependence of meaning (situatedness) on the specifics of various contexts. The analysis of selected mistranslations in this paper refers to experiential information processing and the notion of cognitive economy (Hietaranta, 2017), which is a way of processing information based on intuition, often leading translators to subconsciously overlook details based on their individual and cultural experiences.