2. • This suggests that the translation unit is a shifting concept
in the process of translation and can easily span sentence
boundaries.
• In Section A, Unit 1, and later in Section A, Unit 11, we
mention the unit at the intertextual level; all texts, and
their readers, are affected and influenced by other texts. It
is also true that no text stands in isolation from its
communicative situation and that the choice of translation
unit (in the sense of the structure and content of the TT) is
motivated by extratextual considerations such as legal,
ideological, cultural and even practical constraints.
3. • The methodology in this unit has been based on the
reconstruction of the unit of translation from analysis
of a ST–TT pair or on the presumption of what units
would be used to produce a possible translation of a
given ST. However, another approach is to observe the
process of a translator working on a text. There are two
ways of doing this:either by looking at draft
translations where the revisions indicate some of the
processes that have led to the final TT, or Think-Aloud
Protocols (TAPs), where the researcher generally
presents a translator (novice or professional) with a ST
and records the translator as he or she ‘thinks aloud’
(see Krings 1986; Lorscher 1991; Tirkonnen-Condit and
Jaaskelainen 2000). The last two tasks in this unit
encourage experimentation with this method:
4. CONCLUSION
More recent technical developments enable us to explore the
notion of the unit of translation in exciting ways. In Section C
we have used electronic corpora to help analyse the
lexicological unit and Think-Aloud Protocols to research the
thought processes of the translator. The results are inevitably
fuzzy, because of the problems of analysing what is essentially
a cognitive process. However, it does seem that translators
operate on a variety of different levels and certainly very little
translation can be carried out on a purely word level. As this
section progresses, it will look at increasingly higher levels of
translation where text, discourse and ideology play crucial
roles. Unit C4, however, will first follow Vinay and Darbelnet in
using the segmentation into units of translation as a necessary
prelude to the analysis of translation shifts.
