ABSTRACT
Research on interpreters’ and translators’ cognition in Korea has a short history of around twenty years. The topics of Korean researchers in this area are, however, diverse, including language acquisition, directionality, interpreters’ memory system, as well as their brain. In the early phase, Korean cognitive translatologists began their research by reviewing relevant theories and models from Europe and the Americas and applying them to language pairs, including Korean (i.e., English-Korean). They also revised them to fit the Korean context. Their next move was to develop their own theories and models focusing on individual aspects of interpreters’ and translators’ cognition. They conducted various experiments on, e.g., interpreters’ lexical competence and memory or they analyzed authentic interpreting products of conference interpreters to examine, e.g., the relationship between lexical features of corpus and interpretation patterns. The second generation of researchers exploited more advanced tools and methodology (fMRI, eye-trackers, and software used in psychological experiments) in their empirical research and produced more elaborate results. Unlike in Europe or the Americas, however, cooperation between neuroscientists/psychologists and translatologists has not (yet) come about in Korea, even though a handful of researchers who investigate interpreters’/translators’ brain and cognition seek the opportunity for joint research. In the era of brain and artificial intelligence, the encounter of translatology and cognitive science is, in my opinion, inevitable. Trans- or interdisciplinary research from Korea has the potential to contribute to this development in the future.
