A Comparison of task management and lexical search mechanisms in novice and professional translators/interpreters

There is a fair amount of evidence available from past studies on the way language and translation students', i.e. 'novice translators' handle the task of translation. The paper first examines this evidence in an attempt to summarise typical novice-translator behaviours in managing a translation task and lexical searches. We then present the results of a qualitative analysis of two professional translators/interpreters, who were subjects in a think-aloud study of 14 subjects in 2002 focusing on the way they manage lexical searches during a translation task as well as the time and manner of processing the source language text and target language text. Finally, the performance of the two professionals is compared with the performance of novice translators with the aim of identifying differences that might be responsible for higher speed and quality of target text output by professionals.