Ferreira, Aline and Schwieter, John W., eds. (2015): Psycholinguistic and Cognitive Inquiries into Translation and Interpreting. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 206 p.

The work here reviewed is divided into two parts. Part I, consisting of three chapters, and Part II, made of five chapters, amounting to eight contributions in all. Some information about the contributors follows (p. 203-204), and a language index (p. 205-206) completes the volume. Part I, entitled “Psycholinguistic and cognitive intersections in translation and interpreting,” opens with the paper by Ferreira, Schwieter and Gile “The position of psycholinguistic and cognitive science in translation and interpreting: An introduction” (p. 3-15). The editors and Gile state that “The present collection highlights the input of psycholinguistics and cognitive science to TS through a scrutiny of recent findings and current theories and research” (p. 3). After recalling some historical and contextual background of Translation Studies, section 2 focuses on the interdisciplinarity associated to it, present since the very beginning of its existence. This book, whose content is summarized chapter by chapter (p. 7-12), is presented as an example of methodological innovation with the aim of improving translation and interpreting research through collaboration on an international and interdisciplinary level. In chapter 2, “Translation process research at the interface: Paradigmatic, theoretical, and methodological issues in dialogue with cognitive science, expertise studies, and psycholinguistics” (p. 17-40), Alves looks at translation process research (TPR) and examines the contribution of disciplines like cognitive science, expertise studies, and psycholinguistics to its development. It provides a useful overview of the most recent publications on it and revisits some of the main assumptions of these three disciplines in order to discuss how they interface with TPR. The thoughts and considerations raised in this paper are not novel in TPR literature. However, the interesting point made by Alves is that TPR is now in a position to contribute to the development of cognitive science, expertise studies, and psycholinguistics, since its studies have the potential to corroborate theoretical assumptions by putting hypotheses to the empirical-experimental test. Therefore borrowing becomes bi- or multi-directional (p. 34). In “The contributions of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics to conference interpreting: A critical analysis” (p. 41-64), Gile focuses on the advantages of cognitive science for research into conference interpreting and on the somewhat complex attitudes of many practisearchers towards cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. The analysis offered reflects Gile’s personal interpretation of events and developments. He claims that insights from cognitive psychology and cognitive science in general, even though some ideas and concepts have sometimes been misunderstood, have given more weight to the “interpreters are made, not born” view, and the author hits the nail on the head regarding the importance of not mistaking professional experience for expertise (p. 58). Definite conclusions are apparently difficult to draw, though it is stated that attitudes will probably change (p. 59). Part II, entitled “Studies from psycholinguistic and cognitive perspectives,” begins with Hild´s paper “Discourse comprehension in simultaneous interpreting: The role of expertise and information redundancy” (p. 67-100), who reports a two-dimensional quasi-experimental study which investigates high-level discourse processes in simultaneous interpreting. The two dimensions are expertise and text. The expertise dimension involves two groups of participants, experts and novices, and the text dimension is a comparison of two texts, very similar in most ways, but differing in their information redundancy. The sampling methodology is adequately explained and the results satisfactorily articulated, leading to the conclusion that experts demonstrate higher performance accuracy, being better able to apply strategies which mediate higher-level comprehension processes. The chapter is a valuable contribution which generates new data about these processes and the specific traits of expert interpreting. However, in Hild´s words, it “is necessary to take this research one step further” (p. 94). In chapter 5, Timarová, …