CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

The study compared two groups of advanced learners of English: ten translator and ten teacher trainees. Their association patterns, depth of word knowledge and EN>HU translations skills were investigated. The groups showed similar patterns of advanced depth of word knowledge and translation skills, however, their association patterns and the types of challenges they faced in translation differed. The findings provide important insights into how translator training could benefit from more focused instruction.

9.1 Lessons on vocabulary

The group of translators was characterised by a high ratio of L1 associations (83%) which shows that their mental lexicon activates the translation of the English words they were given. In the group of teacher trainees, 90% of the associations were in L2, which demonstrates that there is a weaker link between L1 and L2 forms in the mental lexicon.

In the translators’ group, the ratio of syntagmatic associations in all their associations was 36%, which suggests that a considerable proportion of the words trigger collocations; a phenomenon that has been described in the case of advanced learners in earlier research (Dóczi – Kormos 2016). The number of syntagmatic associations in the teachers’ group was higher, 45%, which suggests that the collocational tendency was stronger in the teachers’ group. This claim is further supported by the fact that the teachers’ group scored higher on the word- and collocation-level challenges in the translation task.

Collocations are important building blocks of lexical fluency in language users’ L1 and L2 alike. Increasing the speed and ease of their retrieval should be set as an objective for both future translators and teachers.

9.2 Lessons on monitoring skills

As was shown in Tirkonnen-Condit’s study (2002) on the monitor model, the mental lexicon first retrieves the literal translation of the word. The word or phrase can either be accepted or rethought and refined in the process of translation. The study claims that both novice and expert translators experience this temptation to use the first item that emerges, therefore the skill of doubting one’s first idea can be developed. Monitoring can be conscious or automatic, the second mode being the more developed phase. In the course of the training of translators, consciousness-raising is the first step in developing monitoring skills, while the second step is making monitoring an automatic process in the course of translation.

9.3 Lessons on terminology

While both groups showed advanced level depth of word knowledge in their responses to the questionnaire, one aspect of translation seemed to be terra incognita for most of the participants:

terminology. A term is “a given concept within a specific domain, as an abstract entity” (Tamás et al. 2016: 59). When translating a term, the translator needs to identify the field the term belongs to and then find the target language equivalent. In our sample text, the expressions positive correlation and piracy rate needed to be interpreted in the domain of quantitative statistics in order to find the right translation, which posed a challenge to the majority of participants (see 8.2).

Terminology awareness is a skill that needs to be developed in translators. Translating terms can be treated as an advanced level of depth of word knowledge, as if beside the language tag, certain lemmas could also be tagged as ‘terms’. Translators need training in recognising terminology and finding the right strategies to search for target language equivalents. Translators nowadays typically rely on online dictionaries and corpus-based dictionaries. In the case of searching for terms, the latter might prove to be more reliable as the context of the searched expression can help the translator better monitor the chosen equivalent. Furthermore, searching the equivalent in target language texts in the given field can also help translators face the terminology challenge successfully.

9.4 Future research

In our study we have investigated certain aspects of two groups’ mental lexicon, vocabulary and translations skills involving two languages, English and Hungarian. The participants were all proficient speakers of English, and at the same time speakers of other languages as well. These other languages did not appear in the responses, but some of the participants later reported that L3 and L4 (for the translators: C language) words also emerged while doing the associations, but they were not written down. The position of these ‘other’ languages in the ML in the case of multilingual participants would be worthwhile investigating.

Another future research direction is the analysis of the machine translation (MT) of the text. The new generation of neural machine translation systems is capable of deep learning and producing acceptable translations between two new languages. In the very near future, instead of analysing what skills language users need to become expert translators, researchers’ attention will shift to what skills are needed to expertly post-edit translations translated by MT systems. Post-editing will undoubtedly also rely on the language expert’s monitoring skills, though in a different manner. Modern translation and vocabulary research will need to include this rapidly growing field and understand how we can include the benefits MT can give us in vocabulary teaching and translator training.

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APPENDIX 1. THE SOURCE TEXT