The aim of the project entitled “Placebos and nocebos for translators: a model of anticipatory cognition in translation production” is to empirically investigate and understand the role of expectations in the decision-making process when producing a translation of a text or film. The hypothesis that translators' expectations from a translation task influence the decisions they make when performing that task will be tested in a series of experiments involving professional translators and adept translators.
The project activities will be implemented for 36 months. Their budget is PLN 530,334.
The second winning project, "Experiencing video games in translation: a reception model", aims to better understand the reception of games and the role of translation in this process. Through experiments, it will be explored how errors (semantic and typographical) introduced by translation can affect the reception of localised versions of video games.
The team set up as part of the project will investigate whether generating certain expectations towards a translation task (e.g. its difficulty or curiosity value) results in different mental operations on the part of translators than when the opposite expectations are generated or when expectations are not intentionally generated. If we were to deal with such a mechanism, there could, among other things, be significant differences between the resulting translations. This, in turn, would have implications on many levels. The project is of a linguistic and translational nature, contributing to an interdisciplinary debate on the nature of human thinking, with particular emphasis on the degree of rationality and stability of the decision-making process.
– underlines Dr hab. Mikołaj Deckert, Associate Professor at the University of Lodz.
The project implementation period is 48 months and its budget is PLN 1,095,864.