The Representational and Procedural Memory

Memory experts distinguish between representational memory and procedural memory. Representational memory records what you had for breakfast this morning, or what your spouse just told you to get at the store: specific events. Procedural memory helps you check your e-mail, or drive to work: helps you perform skills or activities that are quickly sublimated as unconscious habits.

And translators and interpreters need both. They need representational memory when they need to remember a specific word. They need procedural memory for everything else: typing and computer skills, linguistic and cultural analytical skills for source-text processing, linguistic and cultural production skills for target-text creation, and transfer patterns between the two.

Representational memory might help a translator define a word s/he once looked up in a dictionary; procedural memory might help a translator use the word effec­tively in a translation. Representational memory might help a student to reproduce a translation rule on an exam; procedural memory might help a student to use that rule in an actual translation exercise with little or no awareness of actually doing so.

While both forms of memory are essential for translation, their importance is relatively specialized. Procedural memory is most useful when things go well: when the source text makes sense, is well-formed grammatically and lexically; when the translation job is well-defined, its purpose and target audience clearly understood; when editors and users and critics either like the translation or do not voice their criticisms. Representational memory is most useful when things go less well: when a poorly written source text requires a conscious memory of grammatical rules and fine lexical distinctions; when the translation commissioner is so vague about a job that it cannot be done until the translator has coaxed out of her or him a clear definition of what is to be done; when rules, regularities, patterns, and theories must be spelled out to an irate but ill-informed client, who must be educated to see that what seems like a bad translation is in fact a good one.

Procedural memory is part of the translator's subliminal processing; representational memory is a part of the translator's conscious processing. Procedural memory helps the translator translate rapidly; representational memory is often needed when perceived problems make rapid translation impossible or inadvisable.

What we remember well depends heavily on the context in which we are exposed to it, how relevant it is to our life (practical use-value, emotional and intellectual associations), and the sensory channels through which it comes to us (the more the better).

The setting in which a thing is found or occurs is extremely important for the associations that are so crucial to memory. Without that context it is just an isolated item; in context, it is part of a whole interlocking network of meaningful things. Contextualizing a word or phrase as part of what a person doing a job says or writes to a colleague makes it much easier to remember than attempting to remember it as an independent item.

The physical and cultural context in which the learner learns a thing can also be helpful in building an associative network for later recall. Everyone has had the experience of going in search of something and forgetting what they were looking for — then having to return to the exact spot in which the need for the thing was first conceived, and remembering it instantly. The place in which the item was initially moved to long-term memory jogged that memory and the item was recalled. Students tested on material in the room where they learned it tend to do better on the test than those tested in another room. It seems that the place in which we master information helps recreate the state necessary to retrieve it, probably by stimulating the right emotions, which are very important influences on memory.

This phenomenon involves what is called "state-dependent learning" — the peculiar fact that memories retained in a given mental or physical state are most easily recalled in that state.

The basic principle that links our places and states is simple: a good or bad environment promotes good or bad memories, which inspire a good or bad mood, which inclines us toward good or bad behavior. We needn't even be consciously aware of a pleasant or unpleasant environmental stimulus for it to shape our states. The mere presence of sunlight increases our willingness to help strangers and tip waiters, and people working in a room slowly permeated by the odor of burnt dust lose their appetites, even though they don't notice the smell. On some level, states and places are internal and external versions of each other.

Interpreters have to be able to work anywhere, requiring them to develop the ability to create a productive mental state regardless of external conditions; translators tend to be more place-dependent. Their work station at home or at the office is set up not only for maximum efficiency, dictionaries and telephone close at hand, but also for maximum familiarity, at-homeness. They settle into it at the beginning of any work period in order to recreate the proper working frame of mind, going through little rituals (stacking paper, tidying piles, flipping through a dictionary, sharpening pencils) that put them in a translating mood. What they learn there they remember best there; thus the notorious difficulty of translating while on vacation, or at someone else's work station. It's not so much that the computer keyboard is different; it's that everything is different.

It makes a great deal of difference to learners where they learn — what sort of physical and social environment they inhabit while learning.

Field-dependent learners learn best in "natural" contexts, the contexts in which they would learn something without really trying, because learning and experiencing are so closely tied together. This sort of learner prefers learning-by-doing, hands-on work, on-the-job training to school work or learning-by-reading.

Field-independent learners learn best in artificial or "irrelevant" contexts. They prefer to learn about things, usually from a distance. They love to learn in classrooms, from textbooks and other textual materials (including the World Wide Web or CD-ROM encyclopedias), or from teachers' lectures. They find it easiest to internalize predigested materials, and greatly appreciate being offered summaries, outlines, diagrams and flowcharts. Field-independent language-learners will learn well in traditional grammar-and-vocabulary classrooms; but given the slow pace of such classrooms, they may prefer to learn a foreign language by buying three books, a grammar, a dictionary, and a novel.

The general rule for memory is that the more senses you use to register and rehearse something, the more easily you will remember it. This is called multiple encoding: each word, fact, idea, or other item is encoded through more than one sensory channel — visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, gustatory, olfactory — which provides a complex support network for memory that is exponentially more effective than a single channel.

 

3. The Translators' Learning Styles

Translation is intelligent activity. Howard Gardner director of Project Zero at Harvard University, has been exploring the multiplicity of intelligences since the early 1980s. He argues that, in addition to the linguistic and logical/mathematical intelligence measured by IQ tests, there are at least five other intelligences (probably more):

- musical intelligence: the ability to hear, perform, and compose music with complex skill and attention to detail; musical intelligence is often closely related to, but distinct from, mathematical intelligence

- spatial intelligence: the ability to discern, differentiate, manipulate, and produce spatial shapes and relations; to "sense" or "grasp" (or produce) relations of tension or balance in paintings, sculptures, architecture, and dance; to create and transform fruitful analogies between verbal or musical or other forms and spatial form; related to mathematical intelligence through geometry, but once again distinct

- bodily-kinesthetic intelligence: the ability to understand, produce, and carica­ture bodily states and actions (the intelligence of actors, mimes, dancers, many eloquent speakers); to sculpt bodily motion to perfected ideals of fluidity, harmony, and balance (the intelligence of dancers, athletes, musical performers)

- personal intelligence, also called "emotional intelligence": the ability to track, sort out, and articulate one's own and others' emotional states ("intrapersonal" and "interpersonal" intelligence, respectively; the intelligences of psychoanalysts, good parents, good teachers, good friends); to motivate oneself and others to direct activity toward a desired goal (the intelligence of all successful professionals, especially leaders). And, of course:

- logical/mathematical intelligence: the ability to perceive, sort out, and manipulate order and relation in the world of objects and the abstract symbols used to represent them (the intelligence of mathematicians, philosophers, grammarians)

- linguistic intelligence: the ability to hear, sort out, produce, and manipulate the complexities of a single language (the intelligence of poets, novelists, all good writers, eloquent speakers, effective teachers);

- the ability to learn foreign languages, and to hear, sort out, produce, and manipulate the complexities of transfer among them (the intelligence of translators and interpreters)

This last connection, the obvious one between translators and interpreters and linguistic intelligence, may make it seem as if translators and interpreters were intelligent only linguistically; as if the only intelligence they ever brought to bear on their work as translators were the ability to understand and manipulate language. It is not. Technical translators need high spatial and logical/mathematical intelligence as well. Interpreters and film dubbers need high bodily-kinesthetic and personal intelligence Translators of song lyrics need high musical intelligence.

Indeed one of the most striking discoveries made by educational research in recent years is that different people learn in an almost infinite variety of different ways or "styles." And since good translators are always in the process of "becoming" translators — which is to say, learning to translate better, learning more about language and culture and translation — it can be very useful for both student translators and professional translators to be aware of this variety of learning styles.