Verstehen als Resultat kognitiver Prozesse. Eine konzeptuelle Neuausrichtung der Übersetzungshermeneutik?

Abstract

During the last decades, cognitive science-oriented research in TS has begun to apply a new model of understanding. This cognitive paradigm neurophysiologically models translation processes as the networked integration of perceptual, linguistic and conceptual knowledge. This integrative process, frequently presented as a neuronal flow, is subjective-individual and always strategic-constructive, since only cognitive processes, so-called inferences, can interrelate linguistic and paralinguistic knowledge. Consequently, understanding is a constantly updated text- and knowledge-guided process in which linguistic utterances, cultural, social-interactive, situational, affective and cognitive factors interact with and complement each other. And from this follows a change in the basic hermeneutic paradigm of the subjective, passive understanding of the text by the translator, who intuitively determines the meaning of a text to be translated within a static accumulation of linguistic and factual knowledge. Understanding as a subjective-individual sense-making process in the translation-hermeneutic conception is specified more precisely in the cognitive-scientific paradigm as a traceable process and described as an active and dynamic mental process, as networked integration performance. Since understanding thus always requires a new organisation and networking of the neuronal pathways, there is also a constant shift of meaning that is reflected/produced in each new translation. Within this framework a new model of comprehension can be applied in so far as the understanding of the source text and the planning of a target text are the results of cognitive inferring processes and depend on interactive and communicative experiences, translation strategies and the ability of the translator to consider the prospective reader. On the basis of new cognitive-scientific insights into understanding, the search for the so-called fusion of horizons becomes obsolete. Translational hermeneutics gives preference to understanding differently over understanding better; it is receptive to the otherness and the diversity of own perspectives and experiences. Examples of French-German translations show that a translational hermeneutics understood in this way provides the framework for textual understanding and interpretation in both the receptive and productive phases of translation.