Translation, risk management and cognition

Abstract

Risk management provides a series of concepts applicable to all levels of translation, from social relations through to the translator’s decision making. Distinctions can be made between credibility risk (clients and receivers trust the translator), uncertainty risk (the translator decides between underdetermined alternatives) and communicative risk (the translation must fulfill a social function). These concepts help describe how cognitive processes change with collaborative translation (where risk transfer comes to the fore), with machine translation (appropriate for texts with low communicative risks) and with the role of emotions in decision making (since risk strategies have long been r..