shifts7

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.