Stepping into others’ shoes: a cognitive perspective on target audience orientation in written translation

Abstract

This paper suggests what might allow translators to orient themselves towards their target audience in the translation process. To shed light on translators' ability to put themselves into their target audience' s shoes, I adopt a cognitive perspective by draw-ing on current findings from psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience. I depart from the notion of target audience as applied to written translation. Aspects to this concept and the terminology of audience in translation studies are briefly discussed. Then I turn to translation process research to examine two empirical studies and one theoretical paper for insights into researching translators' target audience orientation. Next, I introduce concepts from social cognition research that might contribute to give a cognitive account of translators' behavior towards the target audience. I then touch upon the relation of the functional neurocognitive network presumably sup-porting target audience orientation with other neurocognitive networks that seem particularly relevant to translation. As a complement, I present a research design for empirically verifying my claim about what enables translators' target audience orien-tation, and gaining further insight into the relations between target audience orienta-tion, translation process and translation product. Finally, some conclusions about the benefits of this type of research are offered.