Comparing Modalities: Cognates as a Case in Point

Abstract

Because interpreting affords only limited opportunity for restatement or corrections, it can be seen as the practitioner's default version, with written translation representing a more polished rendition. Thus, a comparison of the target texts of interpreting and translation can shed light not only on the differences between the two modalities as such, but on the processes involved in each of the two as well. In this case, target texts from interpreting and translation were used to investigate cognate status, performance on false cognates, and cognate processing. In the first stage of this experiment, seven professional translators/interpreters interpreted an English text into their L1, Hebrew; four years later, they rendered the same ST in writing. The source text contained 51 words for which Hebrew offered true cognates and 10 for which it offered false cognates. The data show that: (a) cognate status is most often consistent across modalities; (b) noncognate synonyms are more prevalent in translation than in interpreting; (c) when a participant produces a noncognate translation in one modality and a cognate translation in the other, the noncognate is much likelier to be produced in translation, and (d) performance on false cognates is far superior in translation.

The effect of the integration of talking toys on preschoolers’ vocabulary learning in English

“…For example, some words in the vocabulary test such as police wagon, helicopter and motorcycle are the cognate words in Turkish and English languages. The study conducted by Bastin (2000), Malkiel (2009), Schelesinger andMalkiel (2005) who asserted that cognates are helpful, not only for novices but also for highly interpreters and cognates have positive effect on the speed of word recognition verified the finding of this study.…”

Interference and normalization in genre-controlled multilingual corpora

“…The experimental results reported in Tercedor Sanchez et al's article correlate with those in Shlesinger & Malkiel (2005), where the authors compared the use of cognate vs. non-cognate synonyms in an interpreting task, which is a highly time-constrained activity, and an ordinary translation task without any time-constraints. Their conclusion was that interpreters are more likely to opt for cognates than translators because "the act of mapping a lexical item onto a readily available cognate amounts to an automatic reaction, and avoidance of such a response entails a deliberate effort" (Shlesinger & Malkiel 2005: 173).…”

The Winograd Schemas from Hell

“…Indeed, take the linguistic phenomenon of intralingual false friends. The expression false friends indicates lexical items in two languages that are similar in form but different in meaning [Hill 1982, Shlesinger andMalkiel 2005]. We are used to interlingual false friends, and justify the different meanings by resorting to the languages history or structure.…”