The aim of this chapter is firstly to present an overview of the methods used to research the two concepts explored in the research question, the translatorial habitus and the reading process. The second part of this chapter discusses the different methods which were employed in order to conduct the study. Two types of data were constructed for the purposes of this study: firstly, there is an historical overview of the 20th century poetry translators from Modern Greek into English, based mostly on paratextual and archival material. The empirical phase of the study consists of a two-part interview and an experiment with verbal protocols.
The rationale in support of this choice of methods stems from the concepts that are proposed for exploration in the research question. The basic question of ‘How does the translator habitus affect the reading process?’ may be further analysed as the sum of sub-questions which aim at investigating the key concepts of translator habitus and reading process. For the exploration of the habitus, sub-questions would be: what is habitus? What does it consist of? How is it constructed? Who or what affects it construction? How can we describe it? How can we define it? These questions pertain to both the ontology of the concept and the epistemological issues around its definition (these sub-questions are explored in detail in Chapters 2 and 3 correspondingly).
The concept of the habitus of Modern Greek into English poetry translators is then explored through both primary and secondary material; traces of the translator identity and positionality towards the source and receptor cultures may be in paratextual material as textual manifestations of opinions and choices. Equally, the habitus is (re)constructed via the responses to particular questions in the survey, pertaining to the translators’ background, education, place of origin and residence, and professional practices. The responses to the survey are elaborated and expanded in the first part of the interviews. Accordingly, the question of ‘what is reading?’ could be broken down to a set of complementary questions, such as what does the reading process entail? Who is the translator as reader? And is reading for translation different from reading for pleasure or criticism? Is the translator a professional reader? For this set of questions, I have also used multiple sources: material from the survey and the interviews as well as the paratexts. The reading process is reconstructed, and the translators’ responses further investigated in the experimental phase of the research with the verbal reports.
In the following section a brief overview is presented of the methods used in Translation and Literary Studies to explore readers, reading and the translatorial habitus.
4.1 Researching readers and reading
In recent reports of the use of think aloud protocols both within and without Translation Studies it is Ericsson and Simon (1996) who are credited with elucidating the process, describing it more systematically and highlighting some of its limitations. While it was Ericsson and Simon’s contribution
that brought this method into the attention of researchers, the method of asking participants to vocalize their thoughts during the performance of a task was used long before the 1990s. Specifically, for the purposes of this research project, the work of two early proponents of the method needs to be presented. Richards in the 1920s and Holland in the 1960s conducted reading experiments with their students in a manner very similar to our current understanding of a think aloud protocol. This section describes this contribution and highlights some of the important findings that the work of Richards and Holland helped to uncover.
One of the first recorded attempts at an empirical exploration of reading practices was made by Richards in Cambridge in the 1920s. Richards for several years conducted his own experiments with readers which he then reported and analyzed in his book (1929). His goal was “to provide a new technique for those who wish to discover for themselves what they think and feel about poetry […] and why they should like or dislike it” (1929: 3).
The reading experiment started in fact as an examination for students at Cambridge who were presented with “five extracts of poetry and prose, with no clues as to the author and date, and containing one really
worthless piece—and ask for comments and opinion” (Benson as cited in Russo 1989: 294, emphasis
in the original). Richards notes that most of the participants were undergraduates reading English, with “a considerable number” (1929: 4) of participants reading other subjects, a few graduates and some non-academic members; “men and women were probably included in equal numbers” (1929: 5). The experiment was conducted as follows: the students were given a poem or a prose extract without any further information as to the name of the writer, the title of the work or when the work was written. The text could be anything from Shakespeare to Lovecraft. Richards requested the participants to comment freely upon the poems. The anonymity of the participants was respected as Richards felt it an important precondition for the participants to express their genuine emotions. Richards asked the participants to note each of their readings of the poem. By reading he meant “a number of perusals made at one session … provided that they aroused and sustained one single growing response to the poem” (1929: 4). Most participants gave up to four such readings of each poem.
With the interval of a week, Richards gave a lecture on the poems his participants had commented upon. The lecture focused on the participants’ replies, which were multiple and varied. Richards summarizes his observations on the protocols, as he calls the readings, and focuses on several points that require to be addressed: “the difficulty of making out the plain sense of poetry”, matters of rhythm, visual imagery in poetic reading, mnemonic irrelevancies triggered by the reader’s autobiography, the stock responses, which are the automatic reactions to the poem already existing in a reader’s mind, sentimentality,
inhibition, and general critical preconceptions, which “prior demands made upon poetry as a result of
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reader and the poem” (1929: 13-17). These Richards lists as the “principal obstacles and causes of failure in reading and judgment of poetry” (1929: 17) (emphasis in the original).
The first part of Richards’s book consists of the responses to thirteen poems, which make up “one hundred and seventy-five pages of protocols and his comments on them” (Russo 1989: 294). The participants (through the comments which are edited by Richards) discuss several unsurprising issues such as
1. grammar and syntax,
2. speech devices (such as allusion and assonance), 3. rhythm and meter,
4. the relation between sound and sense, 5. the form of the poem (blank verse, couplets), 6. parts of speech and their function.
The individual responses to the poems vary in terms of the effects the poem has on the participants. Some participants agree with what they see as the moral or the overarching principle of the poem while others disagree; some rejoice in its use of language and admire its craftsmanship and others lament its lack of technique. The language employed by the participants, however, is beset with standard expressions, and the typical categories, used when discussing literature. As Eagleton has noted, although Richards, “sought to demonstrate just how whimsical and subjective literary value-judgments could actually be [...] the most interesting aspect of this project [...] is just how tight a consensus of unconscious valuations underlie these particular differences of opinion” (1996: 13).
Richards was not blind to the ‘consensus of valuations’ Eagleton points out; his attention, however, was focused on tackling what he perceived as an educational problem. He designed this experiment as a tool which would help him assess the reading abilities of his students and in consequence his focus was on how to remedy what he thought was wrong. As Richards’ biographer notes “experiments in reading lead to an essential “diagnosis”’ (Russo 1989: 297) of the state of literary criticism at the time. Of particular importance for the purposes of this thesis is Richards’s category of stock responses, which may refer equally to the differences in a reader’s response to the reading of a text by a canonical writer or a minor writer. It also refers to the demographic and biographical information the reader may have about the writer which may affect the reading.
Another scholar who used verbal reports with readers in order to explore the reading process is Normal Holland, who in 1968 and 1975 conducted interviews with individual readers. These were mainly students of English at the University of Florida, where Holland taught, and another neighbouring college. He first distributed a questionnaire asking for participants for his experiment. The questionnaire asked for the participants’ name, address, age and the names of some writers they liked. Holland writes “I chose those volunteers who mentioned writers whose works went beyond the ordinary reading lists
of a literature curriculum but did not seem to be faddish or outré” (1975: 41). The readers’ choices ranged from Dickens and Defoe (which Holland characterizes as classics) to contemporary authors, like Cohen and Kesey. The final selection of material included Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Holland remarked that he chose literature graduates because he wanted participants who were used to “voicing their reactions freely to literary works” (1975: 41). His sampling method sounds less representative and more convenient: he decided not to average across a spectrum of ages, genders, occupations and so on, his reasoning being that if he discovered the dynamics of response for the chosen group “the same principles should hold, mutatis mutandis, for everyone” (1975: 42). This generalization makes Holland’s sample seem biased. Indeed, Richards in 1929 was far more careful to respect at least the gender ratio in his protocols, as was noted earlier. What is equally curious is the fact that despite the high number of interviews conducted, Holland only chose to disclose the data from five readers in his study.
The experiment consisted of about ten interviews with each reader which Holland conducted himself. The interviews were semi-structured, with some set questions which he asked every participant and a number of recurrent prompts he gave the participants in order to elicit their responses. The participants were asked to read a short story before the interview and were then firstly asked to recount the basic plot of the story and then express any free associations they had made. Personality tests were administered to each reader: to some readers before the interviews, where Holland tried to predict the respondents’ reactions, and to others after the interviews, in which he endeavored to predict the outcomes of the personality tests14.
Despite this battery of tests, Holland felt that the transcripts of the interviews with the participants should be his primary source of information. He then read through the transcribed interviews exercising what he called the ‘third ear’ (1975: 52), looking for patterns in his respondents’ narratives. “As I read, I kept in mind themes […] such as feelings about gender and sexuality, attitudes towards aggression, preferred defenses, sensory modes, recurring configurations, and imagery of all kinds” (1975: 67) explains Holland.
Holland developed a model of reading that places the reader at the centre of the meaning-production process. He argued that the results of the interviews show that the reader draws from a personal depository of experience to determine the meaning of a particular text; and so there are the readers’ idiosyncrasies, their preferences and disposition that, when activated by a textual segment, produce a highly individualistic interpretation of the text.
14The tests administered were an at least ten-card Rorschach test and a five-card Thematic Apperception Test which were
directed by two psychologists. He also gave some of the participants a COPE questionnaire, which is designed to elicit defense mechanisms.
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More recent studies include experiments conducted as part of the empirical explorations of literature and focus on readers and the reading process with verbal reports as the main method of research. The research questions and findings of these studies were discussed in Chapter 2. What should be added here is that these studies discuss not only the results and findings of verbal reports but also undertake the scrutiny of the method itself.
Afflerbach (2000), among others, highlights the methodological concerns which require close attention when researchers use verbal reports and protocol analysis as a research tool. Afflerbach encourages the practice of “consistent and detailed description of the methodology [in order to] build knowledge of the method” (2000: 170-171). Afflerbach neatly summarizes a number of aspects of the verbal report methodology that require careful attention on the stages of design and execution of research using this method. Some representative concerns relate to the participants, the texts, the task, the directions to the participants, the transcription of the reports, the selection of protocol excerpts to be discussed and the coding of protocol excerpts (2000: 171). The concerns vary from the familiarity of the participant with the method and their ability to verbalize their thoughts to the characteristics of the text the participants are asked to comment on, to the clarity of the instructions provided by the researcher to the participants to the treatment of pause time during transcriptions (2000: 171).
A central concern in designing and conducting research with verbal reports is the effect of the task itself on the participant. A key question, discussed by Kintgen (1983) is whether the verbalisation of the thought process alters that thought process, for instance, by making it more analytical. Kintgen notes that when participants undergo the verbal reporting of their thoughts they experience “a slight but general self-consciousness about their activities” (1983: 166). As a result, Hartman states that ‘the perceptions [participants’] report in their think-alouds cannot be interpreted as cognition itself, but as external representations of cognition” (1995: 530). A significant issue arises here: that of reliability and the degree of interpretation required by the researcher in order to reconstruct meaningful inferences from the protocol data. A limitation in a similar vein mentioned by Peskin (1998) regarding the use of verbal protocols with expert readers is the fact that “expertise is characterized by a fluid, automatic process, frequently inaccessible to conscious reflection. It is only when comprehension breaks down that consciousness is triggered” (1998: 246).
Discussing the issue of ecological validity, Kintgen reports a rather homogenous attitude with respect to the verbal reports from his participants. None exhibited hesitation or surprise when they were asked to read and comment on a poem; none complained that their overall reading process was strange or atypical, “though several did explain what was odd about portions of it” (2000: 167). Kintgen also reports that his participants “ended their tapes proclaiming their satisfaction with what they had accomplished” (1983: 167); with all this in mind he concludes that the process of thought verbalization was not particularly unnatural for the participants (1983: 167). Ecological validity is an issue also
mentioned by Borg (2017) who notes that in order to increase it “the fieldwork was carried out at the participant’s workplace” (2017: 288).
Two projects15 exploring the translation process use empirical data, including verbal reports, keystroke logging, translator observation and analysis of translation drafts, to focus specifically on the decision- making process of literary translators. Borg (2016, 2017) conducted a study in which she monitored one literary translator’s work while he translated from French into Maltese. Borg used video and audio recordings (2017: 288) of the translator, Toni Aquilina, as verbal reports alongside observational data were produced while the translator worked on the novel. Borg focuses specifically on the editing and revision stages of the translation process and the decision-making involved in that phase.
Kolb (2013) conducted a think-aloud and key-logging study with five English into German literary translators. The data were then analysed from a reader-response perspective. Kolb notes how “verbal reports and/or key-logging records permit us to gain some insight into how stylistic features are perceived, how they achieve their effects upon the translator and guide him/her in meaning construction” (2013: 213).
Of particular relevance to this study is the fact that Kolb also discusses the issue of translatorial habitus and how its development over time is reflected in the decision-making process. The following section discusses research methods employed by Translation scholars who explore the concept of translatorial habitus.
4.2 Habitus in Translation Studies
Scholars studying the translatorial habitus or the field of (literary) translation have used a variety of research methods: archival and textual studies have focused on the accompanying paratexts and biographical sources of translated material, providing us with a historiography of translators as cultural agents in the 19th and 20th century. These tend to discuss the internalization of linguistic and cultural conflicts as they manifest in the translators’ stylistic choices, translation strategies and their general positionality towards the languages/cultures they translate to and from. They stress they tight interplay between the individual and the communal that influences the translator habitus and the products of their work.
A combination of methods has been employed by translation scholars in order to explore pertinent questions relating to the formation and interaction between habitus, field and cultural/symbolic capital. Style is often regarded as the manifestation of habitus (Erkazanci Durmus 2014, Gouanvic 2005). Ideological positionings are also interpreted as a manifestation of the interplay between the translator’s individual personality and their internalization of societal norms and translational conventions (Vosloo
15 An additional, third project exists, namely Englund Dimitrova (2005). This project however, was de-selected and will not
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2007, Liu 2012). The emphasis was on the translators’ self-image as we saw in the study conducted by Sela-Sheffy (2008). These are archival and textual studies that attempt to reconstruct the habitus through a perusal of translated texts and accompanying paratexts.
Several of the case studies mentioned in this chapter draw data from archival research on translators’ texts and paratexts (Gouanvic 2005, Tall 1990, Vosloo 2007, Wolf 2013, Meylaerts 2011) in order to trace the social and biographical trajectories of translators in the past. This historiographical approach attempts to redress the invisibility of translators and of the profession in the past, which in turn informs our understanding of how current practices came to be.
One of the criticisms against modern historiography is that in depending solely on textual or paratextual material in order to find traces of the translator’s process or ideologies, the researcher relies heavily on their interpretation and usually incomplete knowledge of competing forces that brought about the translation. The translated text and the paratexts accompanying it may reveal but also obfuscate tensions, motives and rationale behind translation decisions. Also, the researcher should bear in mind that what is omitted and who is invisible may be of equal importance to what and who is seen in the texts and paratexts. Using several sources of data (triangulation) is thought a method to overcome some of these obstacles.
A different approach comes with empirical explorations of questions pertaining to translation as a social act. Questionnaires and interviews have been used by some scholars, as seen in this chapter, (Amit-