The central focus of my present research is the analysis of the cognitive aspects of translation. In particular, I seek to demonstrate why human translators every once in a while produce translations whose quality, to put it kindly, leaves much to be desired because of the misunderstandings that have occurred during the translation process. Why is it that sometimes our understanding of the meaning of a text differs from that originally intended by the author? Why, both in translating and with texts in general, is it sometimes the case that my conception of a text differs from yours?

If we exclude lack of time, fatigue and the other external factors influencing human activity and focus merely on information processing, cognition, it is possible to explain misunderstandings in a number of ways which are not always mutually exclusive but may sometimes operate simultaneously.

In an as-yet -unpublished work, I present some phenomena or situational experiences which constitute risks to the functioning of human cognition and thus may explain misunderstandings, both in translation and in the use of texts in general. Some of these explanations have already been known for some time outside translation studies, in one way or another, but they have simply not been applied to erroneous or defective translation approaches.

One explanation for misunderstandings is that a human being does not necessarily always act in an analytical way but instead every now and then relies, albeit subconsciously, on certain intuitive solutions, even though he or she can not afford to reduce the cognitive burden in this way, thinking “I have dealt with this sort of thing so many times in the past that I no longer have the need to spend time verifying the details…” Sometimes, however, the similarity between the present and previously experienced situations is deceptive and only hold true to a certain point, at which stage a person, for example a translator, has already committed themselves to a subsequent set of actions by choosing a certain interpretation, which in a wider and more precise analysis of the text would prove either ill-suited to the rest of the text or at the very least not the only possible interpretation. In both cases there is a risk of misunderstanding.

Another possible explanation for misunderstandings occurring in translation is our innate human tendency to attempt to interpret and measure the world according to our own units of measurement. As a human being is a hermeneutical being and thus not only observes the world but also seeks to understand it, it may sometimes transpire that this effort to understand what occurs around oneself grows too strong. In this case, a person using a text, for example a translator, may experience a sense of panic, albeit subconsciously, and force their own interpretation on the foreign environment based on their own cultural background, even if it is neither correct, appropriate or even sensible. The Internet offers a multitude of websites with terrible translations as examples of the sometimes tragicomic, even pathetic, results of this method.

It is regrettable how often these kinds of faulty translations also result from the translator’s insufficient language and translation skills, often further paired with a virtually non-existent ability to interpret cultural messages. The job title ‘translator’ (unlike the title Authorised Translator) is unprotected, however, making it possible for anyone to be presented as a translator on any list, or elsewhere – much in the same way as anyone can call themselves an artist…

My effort to examine the cognitive side of translation is above all related to the conception that translation is inherently a type of communication of the same nature as communication occurring without translation. This does not, however, make translation purely a special case of communication and all its characteristics explicable by general theories regarding communication. On the contrary, translation is a form of communication which combines a variety of factors that do not function in the same way in unilingual communication. One of those central factors is the author’s need and ability to anticipate the expectations and demands of the message’s future recipients, the users of the message.

In unilingual communication, especially in one’s own first language, it is usually possible to resort, relatively safely, to tried and tested methods. In the field of translation, the situation is not the same.

For this reason it is often recommended that the translator translate only into their own first language, because that is the language and culture that the translator knows best. In the case of small languages it is often impossible to implement this principle. There are, for example, very few Finnish speakers and people well enough acquainted with Finnish culture in other countries, so very often translations from Finnish to other languages are left to Finnish speakers. In these cases the translator may not necessarily always be able to anticipate the cognitive approaches of future users of the text and the cultural and other interpretational processes from which they stem, resulting in a translation that perhaps sits ill in its environment and fails to sound completely natural. In my forthcoming work I also examine the background factors of this phenomenon.