1. Background: A historical reminder Translation Studies (TS), the young academic discipline which has developed around research on translation and interpreting, spans a remarkably wide spec trum of approaches, theories and research methods. he present collection high lights the input of psycholinguistics and cognitive science to TS through a scrutiny of recent indings and current theories and research. Before presenting the con tributions ofered in this volume, it is perhaps useful to recall some historical and contextual background to gain a better overall perspective and view of where and how they it in the wider framework of past and present TS. 1.1 he beginnings Relection on translation is at least as old as (written) human history, and (pre scriptive) statements on how to translate were made through the ages by numer ous important personalities, including translators, but also philosophers, religious leaders, and writers (see for instance Robinson 1997). When the idea of scientii cally investigating translation eventually emerged in the 1950s, the pioneers were linguists who were primarily interested in linguistic aspects of translation; that is, in relationships between linguistic systems and the reality they describe, between the linguistic systems as such, and between source texts and target texts as lin guistic assemblies. Nida (1964), who worked with Bible translators, was perhaps the irst linguist who considered translation under the light of its communicative function. his led him to a signiicant departure from a purely linguistic analysis of relations between source texts and target texts, and into the idea of distinguishing between ‘formal equivalence’, which is linguistically based, and ‘dynamic equiva lence’, which is communication oriented. his distinction, along with Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1958) classiication of translation ‘techniques’, was perhaps what paved the way to later work on translation as targeted behaviour as opposed to a quest for linguistic equivalence. Levý (1967) was one of the irst investigators to shit the angle from the lin guistic systems or texts to the translators and their behaviour. He applied the prin ciples of mathematical game theory by considering that the translators’ decisions were based on strategic considerations aiming for maximum ‘gain’. Translation Studies as a would-be autonomous academic ield with disci plinary aspirations, expressed most illustratively in Holmes’ (1972/1988) famous paper “he name and nature of Translation Studies,” started developing about half a decade later in Western Europe. he scholars who made up the academic kernel of the movement worked mostly around comparative literature, the foci being literary texts and their translation(s), translation and culture, translation and society. At the same time, throughout Europe and in the USSR, academ ics involved in translator and interpreter training started developing their own theories. hose theories moved away from formal linguistic approaches and into more sociocultural and communication-based approaches: such was the case of German functionalist theories, in particular the Skopos theory (Reiß & Vermeer 1984) and the theory of translatorial action (Holz Mänttääri 1984) or into more cognitive considerations, mostly without relying on input from cognitive psy chology. his was the case of Interpretive heory, also known as the heory of Sense (théorie du sens), developed by Seleskovitch and Lederer (see Seleskovitch 1977, 1981; Seleskovitch & Lederer 1989) for interpreting before it was extended to written translation, though Chernov, whose interest was also in conference interpreting, (see Chernov’s 1994 model of the interpreting process), did work with psycholinguists.
