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Although in recent years English has become a lingua franca of the business and research world, the need for well-trained professional translators and interpreters has actually increased as more companies and governments reach outside of their language area. Since translation is an economic activity, there are commercial interests and needs to consider. Non-literary translators must balance their linguistic, information, and time resources to achieve fit-for-purpose translation, with differing demands on quality. Throughout the process, translators occupy a central position as experts in the complex system of translational action, managing their cognitive resources and bringing various types of competence to bear in order to complete the translation task. Translational action and translation processes are probably best explained in social realist terms: the situated activity of translating is of primary interest here, but the other domain associated with people or agency (the psychobiography of the translator) as well as the two domains associated with social structures (the social setting of the translator's workplace and the contextual resources) must also be considered. Translation studies, too, has recently moved from an almost exclusive focus on products towards considering workplace and cognitive processes and the effects of those processes on the quality of products. The latter are the result of the interaction between societal expectations of what translations should be, what translators should do, and translators' emergent practices and translation competence that allow them to produce acceptable translations within temporal and economic constraints. Investigating translation processes becomes truly relevant to translation competence and curriculum development when the processes investigated reflect actual workplace practices of working translators and not artefacts of experimental settings and tasks. We will report on an ongoing research project using a multimethod approach that allows us to monitor professional translators at their usual workplace in as controlled and non-invasive a manner as possible and has made it possible to infer what background conditions, linguistic, metalinguistic, aptitude, socio-economic, and psychological characteristics fit the profile of a successful language professional. In particular, we will focus on the translators' self-concepts and their understanding of what their roles are. We will discuss differences between translation into the language of the surrounding community and into other languages as well as translators' conceptualizations of who has primary responsibility for various stages of the translation process (i.e. source text quality, terminology, research, revision, target text quality, etc.).

Understanding translation competence is crucial not only for translator and interpreter training institutions, but also for increasingly multilingually-dependent governmental institutions and companies. To illustrate how experiments in translation can contribute to understanding translation competence, we focus on one aspect directly related to new technological developments in the workplace: instrumental competence. We present an approach to triangulating empirical data from translation processes and products that could contribute important insights into all levels of translation competence, from novice to seasoned professional.

The reality of professional translation in knowledge economies in the digital age is intensive human-machine interaction and highly technologized workplaces. Humans and machines can reasonably be considered to impact on, and adjust to, each other in order to respond to disturbances and meet new demands. Ideally, technology facilitates or contributes to optimizing human performance, but systems can sometimes react inappropriately and actually impede it. Translation studies has shown a growing interest in translation as a system that involves not only multiple agents but also human-computer interactions. An ergonomic perspective of professional translation can provide an appropriate framework to investigate the impact of various factors on the situated activity of translation. For example, understanding how translators use existing technology contributes to developing and optimizing CAT tools as well as motivating the need for individual adaptations to be built into technologies and systems when indicated. And a lack of feedback loops at crucial points may result is missed opportunities for developing adaptive expertise within the system. Translation process research and cognitive translatology has used a variety of methods to gain information about the internal processes and decision-making involved in translation work, many of which have been employed in our recent investigations of professional translation (e.g., screen and video recordings at the workplace, interviews, questionnaires, eye tracking, computer logging, usability experiments, and retrospective verbalizations). Models of situated cognition, adaptive expertise, and ergonomics provide the framework to assess and describe the cognitive and organizational factors that impact on the situated activity of professional translation. A large corpus of data collected in a previous longitudinal study of translation competence served as a source of indications of ergonomic issues to form hypotheses which were refined with data from on-site ergonomic assessments and recordings of three groups of professional translators (i.e. commercial, government, and freelance). In subsequent phases of the project, some of the hypotheses were tested with experiments in a usability lab and an online survey. The data from each project phase has been analyzed for indicators of cognitive dissonance attributable to the ergonomics of the human-computer interfaces or workplace conditions and triangulated with the findings from the other phases. Our research suggests that a heightened appreciation of the importance of ergonomic resources, tools, settings, equipment, and organizational systems can help translators and companies design more efficient and user-oriented workplaces, tools, and workflows.

Abstract
The information, events and voices that receive media attention are highly dependent on their linguistic form – when the language is accessible to journalists, the news is more likely to enter public discourse. If the voices are in languages other than that of the region the journalist is writing for, then translation strategies can influence not only the news style but also the selection and perspectivation of the information presented. In this article, we discuss how working between languages inside the newsroom can endanger the flow of accurate information. Among other stakeholders, we focus on journalists as key gatekeepers in global and local newsflows who need to cope with cross-linguistic communication in their processes of news production. Initial analyses show that translation matters in the newsroom, but it is far from being part of systematic professional socialization or subject to quality measures.

Öffentliche Diskurse über Energiepolitik spielen eine entscheidende Rolle, wenn es darum geht, die «Energiestrategie 2050» der Schweizer Regierung erfolgreich umzusetzen. Das interdisziplinäre Forschungsprojekt «Energiediskurse in der Schweiz» untersucht Muster des öffentlichen Sprachgebrauchs zum Thema. Solche Muster bilden die Grundlage für das öffentliche Verständnis der Themen und Kontroversen im demokratischen Dialog und in der vernetzten Innovation. Das vorliegende «Working Paper» präsentiert das dreijährige Projekt in seinen theoretischen und methodischen Grundzügen ebenso wie ausgewählte Ergebnisse des ersten Projektjahrs. Dazu gehören der Aufbau und die Annotation des digitalen Swiss-AL-Textkorpus ebenso wie Vergleiche zwischen dem Sprachgebrauch in den drei Landessprachen Deutsch, Französisch und Italienisch. So kann beispielsweise der Einfluss von Ereignissen wie der Nuklearkatastrophe in Fukushima Daiichi nachgezeichnet werden, in dem die Hinweise auf das Ereignis über die Jahre hinweg gemessen werden. Zudem gibt es erste Hinweise und Belege dafür, dass die verschiedenen Sprachen den öffentlichen Diskurs über Energiefragen auch unterschiedlich gestalten. Bestimmte Wortkombinationen stehen für Konzepte wie «erneuerbare», «Wind-», «Solar-», «Nuklear-» oder «fossile» Energien, wobei diese Konzepte in den verschiedenen Sprachen unterschiedlich gewichtet sind. Argumentationsstrategien beispielsweise in Bezug auf die «erneuerbaren Energien» scheinen sich ebenfalls zu unterscheiden, so dass es angezeigt ist, in der Fortsetzung des Projekts die nationalen und regionalen Diskurse je für sich und detaillierter zu untersuchen. Im Fokus der nächsten Projektphasen werden systematische Analysen zu diskursiven Kontroversen und Koalitionen stehen, um Diskursnetzwerke zwischen relevanten Akteuren zu identifizieren. ; Public discourse about energy policies plays a key role in the successful implementation of the Swiss energy strategy. The interdisciplinary research project Energy Discourses in Switzerland focuses on the patterns of language use related to energy policy. Patterns of language use are understood and analyzed as drivers or constraints of democratic dialogue and collective innovation in the field. This working paper outlines exemplary results of the project work in the first year of the 3-year project, including exploratory analyses of the Swiss-AL corpus and comparisons of the discourses typical of actors whose public communication is in one of the Swiss national languages or some combination of them. The influence of events such as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on public discourse were traced by mapping the frequency of references to that event in texts. The changes over time of terms associated with energy issues also provided indications of the development of public discourses. Initial analyses of the multilingual Swiss-AL corpus indicate that the way that energy in its various forms is discussed seems to differ depending on the language of the texts. The most frequent word combinations represent concepts such as renewable, hydro, wind, solar, nuclear, and fossil-fueled energy but the order of importance differs for German, French, Italian, and English. Argumentation strategies also seem to vary not only between languages but also between multilingual and monolingual sources in the Swiss-AL corpus, suggesting that national and local discourses need to be examined separately and in more detail. The focus of the next phase of the project will be on systematically analysing discourse controversies and coalitions in order to identify discursively linked actor networks.

With an increased societal focus on issues such as climate change, the way governments communicate with their citizens about energy policy has grown in importance. The complexity of Switzerland's official multilingualism makes this process worthy of critical consideration. In particular, the federal government website presents an interesting test case of the extent to which communication about energy policy is balanced in terms of the four Swiss national languages and whether such information is accessible to those who are not proficient in any of them (e.g. many non-Swiss media). The quantitative data are supplemented with a qualitative analysis of two key terms in Swiss energy policy. Finally, implications for government-citizen communication are discussed from a translation perspective.