The Contact Between Text, Mind, and One's Own Word

in a Translation Workshop^*

In the past few years, a productivist pragmatism which presents itself as an unquestionable and universally valid doctrine seems to be subjecting human exchanges to the empire of its economical laws. All pursuits are reduced to their lucrative and income-producing aspects. From a purely professional perspective, translation has now come to be thought of as a way of earning a living, while the historical role it had within human evolution as a means of communication through the word is forgotten. I'm far from proposing that the practical aspects of the profession be neglected, but in my opinion if the transcendent humanistic character of our work is not taken into account in the first place and mere profitability is sought, the very essence of our profession is distorted.

The purpose of this paper is to present a way of conducting a translation workshop so as to make the most of this reciprocal learning environment [ámbito de enseñaje], not only with reference to the subject at hand but also with regard to the spirit with which the work is undertaken. The goal is to reaffirm translation as a spiritual endeavor. To this end, I will enumerate the stages into which I usually divide my courses, after which I will show what role I assign to the spirit in each of these stages.

First, however, I must clarify some of the terms I will use in this brief exposition. Because I am a translator, that is to say, a staunch investigator of meanings, the meanings of words have a special weight for me. When I write, no matter what the subject is, I take care to be explicit about what I understand each word to mean. In the alchemy of speech, even the most common terms pass through personal alembics, and each one of us is a unique living dictionary.

I will clarify, then, what I mean by "workshop," "contact," "text," "mind," and "one's own word," just as they appear in the title. I will also have to indicate what I mean by reciprocal learning environment, a phrase I have just used.

The term workshop is of a material and illustrious lineage. In Latin a workshop is called astellarium, the origin of astillero [shipyard] in Spanish, which in French gave rise to atélier, as in that of a carpenter, modiste, painter, or sculptor. "A place where one carries out manual labor," according to María Moliner's definition.¹Its etymology speaks of practical tasks and in no way means free of theory, as Aristotle well knew and as we were reminded, more recently, by Valentín García Yebra.² Theory is part and parcel of practice, is inserted in it, intertwined with it, it penetrates and sustains it. However, in a workshop it very rarely comes to the fore.

Some characteristics distinguish the workshop environment, as I view it, from other places designated for translation practice. They are the following:

• A workshop is not part of a program of academic studies. It is extracurricular. It is not governed by grades, points, credits, or exams. It is not a course taken to comply with certain curricular requirements but rather a voluntary encounter.
• A workshop is a place for bilateral communication between the coordinator and the participants, for "reciprocal learning," [enseñaje] as set forth in the formula by Argentine thinker and psychoanalyst Enrique Pichon Rivière,³ that is, for him⁴ who is teaching to learn and for him who is learning to teach, "rejecting—as Nicolás Bratosevich rightly says, referring to literary workshops—the temptation of the magisterial class and the illuminated voice."⁵
• In a workshop one does not inculcate knowledge in the way a traditional course does; rather, ways of reading, interpreting, and communicating are discussed freely. A certain creative liberty, a departure from the necessarily stricter framework of formal education reigns therein, though it does not imply that no method is used. To set up a radical opposition between the concept of creative freedom and that of method is as fallacious as drawing a strong dividing line between theory and practice. A workshop is meant to be an experience in reflective practice, a practice that is in no way detached from reasoning and analysis, but that does seek to free itself from previous "theories," remaining unconditioned by a strict and coherent system of ideas, as a theory normally is. The intention is for the workshop to serve not only to assimilate techniques, skills, or knowledge from the outside but to acquire an attitude vis-à-vis texts, a way of working with them that could serve as a model for future professional undertakings.
• A translation workshop is an intermediate entity between a language course and a literary workshop. I would say it is a space to learn to read and write: to write like a writer and to read as only a translator can do it. Borges put it very succinctly: "The translator is a very close reader."⁶ But the translator is also a rapporteur⁷ and a writer working within certain fixed limits. Whether it is a question of a poem, a short story, a computer manual, or a birth certificate, translating is always a literary operation. Naturally, the translator is subject to the golden rule of being faithful to the original text; this is the translator's model of beauty, his aesthetic ideal, as Milan Kundera rightly points out.⁸ But aside from this, the translator's manipulation of what resources are available in the target language places him clearly as a language craftsman, one who must avail himself of the same linguistic abilities as a creative writer. What I will say from here on is therefore applicable to any type of workshop, not only a literary translation workshop, regardless of the subject matter or the type of texts used.

Heretofore we have been concerned with the term workshop. I would now like to discuss what I mean by mind. According to epistemologist Gregory Bateson, the mind is not enclosed within the limits of a person's body. The mind originates in the group one lives in and directs itself toward that group. The mind is an ecological matter.⁹ I believe that the Batesonian concept of mind can be translated as espíritu [spirit]. I bring this terminological variant up for two reasons:

(1) There is an intellectualist tradition present in the use of the term mente [mind] in the Spanish language according to which mind is taken as a synonym of intellect. However, when I say that a contact between minds takes place in the workshop, I am not referring only to a process of reasoning but to the entire conglomerate of sensations and emotions that accompany our ideas in our daily translating. Besides, this contact between minds is something more than a contact between isolated individuals, for language, in fact, belongs to no one: it is a social patrimony. In the same sense, the language philosopher Jerome Bruner asserts that we have to stop conceiving of one's being as a unique, lasting nucleus and start to conceive of it rather as "parceled out in texts and conversations, localized within a community of learning."¹⁰

(2) The phenomenon generated in the group transcends the acquisition of information and knowledge and, if the approach is correct, gives rise to an exchange of another order. In the workshop, when we concern ourselves with the Word, in particular with one's own word, we are tackling a topic that is in no way secondary and the magnitude of which frequently surpasses us. It is a question of communication between minds or mental communication, nothing more nothing less; or, if I may suggest after all the aforesaid preambles, a question of spiritual communication.

I would also like to clarify the term text. This is simpler, since decades of discourse analysis have shown us that énoncé is one thing and énonciation another; the first is the text and the second the discourse; the first one is mere printed type and the second all the life it contains, all the communication it embodies. In the workshop we are not concerned with texts as dead entities, but with the reflections of texts in each participant, that will in turn give way to a new text, the translated one, which should contain the same life as the original.

Having made these clarifications, let us see what the material process in the workshop is and how it can be used in a spiritual way.

I will enumerate the stages: (1) A text is handed out for translation accompanied by a brief instruction about the source and intended readership. (2) Each participant should draft a first version at home and bring it to the following meeting. (3) During this meeting, oral comments are encouraged regarding the content of the original text. (4) One participant reads a paragraph of his translation, sentence by sentence, while the others follow along, first with the original and then with their own. (5) All questions and comments that point to dissimilarities between the different versions are formulated. (6) The coordinator asks for a clean copy of the corrected translation for the next class. (7) At the next meeting, the coordinator collects the translations, reviews them at home, and returns them with his own comments at the following class.

In these seven stages, the process undertaken with each "text" is completed in its materiality. But it can be the origin of other, very diverse, mental contacts. I will go back to these steps one by one to see what there is or may be beneath the dry letter.

(1) A text is handed out for translation accompanied by a brief instruction about the source and intended readership.

Given what has been said, one never hands out a text for translation. One hands out what at the time of writing was a living communication of one human being with his contemporaries or with his future fellow human beings, a communication that at that time had a purpose, fulfilled a function, and may have been impregnated with enormous expressiveness. The brief instruction about the source and intended readership urges, in the present, a reenactment of the dialogue that the author sustained in the past with his audience and transforms it into a new living communication. What one must seek is compenetration with the text, literally speaking: to penetrate it and let oneself be penetrated by it, until it becomes a very part of oneself.

(2) Each participant should draft a first version at home and bring it to the following meeting.

The fact that each person must produce his own version for the workshop, a place of receptivity and voluntary attendance, of uncensored acceptance, leads to the internal shaping, at the time of translating, of the image of an attentive and friendly receptor—a benign interlocutor. This is the first prerequisite for translating in the most proficient way one is capable of. The creativity of the translator, a fundamental element of his proficiency, depends on this image being successfully established throughout the workshop, dislodging that of other excessively critical, despairing, or invalidating voices.

This ties in with the need to restore the workshop participant's confidence in his own word. Frequently, misdirected grammar or language courses leave in their wake a jumble of idiomatic cripples. By placing excessive stress on rules and norms, without a correlative stimulus of creativity, some teachers inculcate their pupils with a constraining and repressive attitude about their potential as speakers of a language. It is then nearly a task of therapeutic rehabilitation to restore the translator's lost confidence in his capacity for expression in order for him to regain the idiomatic treasures buried in his inner memory and circulate more freely among the signified and signifiers that inhabit within him—sometimes without his awareness.

(3) At the beginning of this meeting, oral comments are encouraged regarding the content of the original text.

As a step previous to the checking and evaluation of the translation, the oral recounting is the best way to verify that the function, intent, and style of the text have been correctly grasped, without which it is very likely that the translation will fail. Useful guides at this stage are questions such as those suggested by Bénard and Horguelin: Who wrote the text? For whom? How? Why? and the most important of all, With what intent?¹¹ The purpose of recounting is not only to demonstrate good comprehension of, or compenetration with, the original but also to situate the translator in his function as communicator, as Hatim and Mason call him.¹² "A translation is reported speech," Roman Jakobson wrote.¹³ During the recounting, the coordinator should pretend that he knows nothing about the message, so that the participant pushes to the extreme his grasp of what is essential in the text and the communicative situation, as well as his capacity for synthesis and expressive ability.

(4) One participant reads a paragraph of his translation, sentence by sentence, while the others follow along, first with the original and then with their own.

We thus reach the most delicate of the workshop stages, a process that demands a clear assessment by the coordinator of the intellectual effort involved, in order to facilitate it or alleviate it. When a participant reads his version, and after that a different version is read by another one, each person must simultaneously retain in his consciousness three utterances (the original added), among which a complex series of comparisons and search for equivalencies must be made. These steps cannot be carried out all together; if the process is to be satisfactory, it is best to divide it as follows.

4a. When a participant reads his translation of the paragraph, the rest should follow along with the original, putting their own versions completely aside. It is an opportunity to pull away from one's own translation and, with as much objectivity as possible, to evaluate what a fellow participant has done. It is a moment, then, of detachment from the ego, and of generosity. It is also an excellent time for the coordinator to help fine-tune the collective ear and to detect the most important errors that may have been made, distinguishing these from secondary deficiencies.

4b. In asking the same participant to repeat his translation sentence by sentence, the others now look at their own versions, seeking to discern where these are significantly different from the read-aloud one and whether the latter contributes something worth being taken into account.

Let us now proceed to the fifth stage.

(5) All questions and comments that point to dissimilarities between the different versions are formulated.

In a climate of recognition for what was done well, the precise pointing out of what is comparable or equivalent in different versions, by way of contrast with preferable or outstanding solutions, affords the type of discernment that we are trying to inculcate. The possibility that one term or expression can be translated in many valid ways gives rise to an expressive pluralism that is one of the greatest fruits of a translation workshop, a source of collective idiomatic enrichment—including, of course, that of the coordinator. It should be a democratic interchange, not an authoritarian imposition. In this sense, I would like to recall what has been said by the Argentine therapist and thinker José Bebchuk with regard to the process of psychotherapy: "Do I want to live in a world in which I am the one who knows and the patient obeys me as one obeys authority? Do I want to coexist with my interlocutor so that he/she grants me power in exchange for what I know? Do I want to behave like an authority that produces change in the other without going through a mutual collaboration?"¹⁴

An open attitude toward the potential contribution of everyone, removing the coordinator from the position of having the preferred truth, is one of the conditions for conducting the workshop experience and at the same time the one that permits to gain the most positive elements from it.

(6) The coordinator asks for a clean copy of the corrected translation for the next class.

When the individual mind retires into privacy after the experience of the ecological mind, it does so accompanied by the voices of the group. Nevertheless, one's own word need not be lost. If the work of discernment has been well done, each participant will know what to retain and what to change in his original version. Making a clean copy of the first version affords the opportunity of a new "virtual" meeting with the group (with fellow participants and the coordinator), where recollection of what was discussed in class allows a keener sense of judgment to be applied to choices without giving up one's own personality.

It is often said that the translator should disappear, that he should not be perceived as such; that the ideal is for the reader not to realize that the translator exists and to have the sensation of reading the author directly. I also believed in this illusion and aimed for this ideal, until someone told me that he used to recognize my translations even when my name was omitted. It seems that I have a style of translating. I have accepted my unavoidable idiolect. I am an intermediary, not a nothing. Though I may try to hide, my word gives me away.

(7) At the next meeting, the coordinator collects the translations, reviews them at home, and returns them with his own comments the following class.

Here, it is the coordinator who maintains a new "virtual" meeting with the participants through their translations, and it is essential that he learn to adapt to each one's own word. The same idea may be transmitted in as many diverse ways as there are participants in the group, and the skill of the coordinator as a reviewer-trainer¹⁵ consists in accepting the other's word, his way of expression, to the fullest possible degree in order to show how to make his version approximate what can be considered most faithful and natural.

Before returning the translations that have been reviewed, the coordinator may mark some general problems or the ones worth sharing. Oral comments on these difficulties should be done in an anonymous fashion. The faults noted have no name; the problem of one participant is the problem of the group. Pointing out a mistake made is not only useful for the person who made it; for the others, it is the time to reflect on the problems that anyone could have in translating, or in the face of a similar case. It is a warning.

Finally, let us highlight the pedagogical importance of noting not only the faults, but rather, with no less emphasis, the achievements; the discoveries; the apt, original, or novel solutions; the fruits of creativity.

I have exposed, very briefly and in general terms, a model of work. This scheme can be utilized in small groups of four to ten persons who get together regularly over a period of two or more months in two- or three-hour meetings. If the workshop is of a longer duration, it would be appropriate to intercalate every so often a "text" to translate without an ensuing discussion in class, in order to follow up on the evolution of each individual. Shortening some steps and introducing some modifications in the basic procedure, it is possible to work similarly with larger groups, of up to 30 persons, who get together once a month or sporadically for more lengthy meetings.

Beyond the diverse formats available, what is important is to keep in mind the tenets that preside over this way of working. To recapitulate, they have to do with acknowledging translation as an act of human communication, valuing the enriching contact between minds that the workshop environment fosters, and respecting each person's idiosyncrasy expressed in what is most unique: his own word.

Footnotes

^* Paper read (in Spanish) at the Second Latin American Conference on Translation and Interpretation, organized by the Colegio de Traductores Públicos de Buenos Aires, April 23-25, 1998. The author thanks Judith Ravin for her help in the translation of this paper into English.

¹ "Taller," in María Moliner, Diccionario de uso del español, Madrid, Gredos, 2 vols., 1966.

² "La teoría sola es estéril, y la práctica sin teoría, rutinaria y ciega." (Theory alone is sterile, and practice without theory, routine and blind.) Valentín García Yebra, Teoría y práctica de la traducción, Madrid, Gredos, 2 vols., 2nd. ed., 1984, p. 16.

³ Enrique Pichon Rivière, El proceso grupal. Del psicoanálisis a la psicología social, Buenos Aires, Nueva Visión, 1989, p. 14. The word "enseñaje" has been coined through the blending of "enseñanza" (teaching) and "aprendizaje" (learning).

⁴ The masculine pronoun is used for the sake of brevity. It refers to both genres, of course.

⁵ Nicolás Bratosevich, Taller literario. Metodología/Dinámica grupal/Bases teóricas, Buenos Aires, Edicial, 1992, p. 15.

⁶ Quoted by his translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni; see my article "I Know You Know," ATA Source, Vol. 28, 1998, pp. 1 and 13-14.

⁷ See Brian Mossop, "The Translator as Rapporteur: A Concept for Training and Self-Improvement," Meta, vol. 28, # 3, 1983, pp. 244-247.

⁸ "A translation is only beautiful when it is faithful. It is the passion for faithfulness that distinguishes the authentic translator." Milan Kundera, "Traducción y pasión por la palabra," Gaceta de la Traducción, # 1, 1993, p. 78.

⁹ See Gregory Bateson's two seminal works, Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature.

¹⁰ Jerome S. Bruner, Acts of Meaning, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1990.

¹¹ Jean-Paul Bénard and Paul A. Horguelin, Pratique de la traduction: version générale, Montreal, Linguatech, 1979, p. 25.

¹² Basil Hatim and Ian Mason, The Translator as Communicator, London, Routledge, 1997.

¹³ Roman Jakobson, "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation," in R. A. Brower, ed., On Translation, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1959. See also Mossop, op. cit.

¹⁴ Bebchuk, J., "Proceso y resultado en psicoterapia," Sistemas Familiares, Vol. 13, # 13, November 1997, p. 58.

¹⁵ For more on this topic, see my article "Revision as a Teaching Experience," Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the American Translators Association, 1997, pp. 163-171.

A Competent Translator And Effective Knowledge Transfer

Introduction

In this world of science and technology there is knowledge explosion every day. This knowledge which is generally written in the English language needs to be transmitted in various languages so that people who do not know how to speak and write the original langauge can get the knowledge necessary for industrial development and technological innovation to keep up with the rest of the world. To transmit this knowledge effectively, there is a need for competent translators in various languages.

The participants of this study were fifty-five experienced Malaysian part-time translators of scientific texts from English to Malay.

Five of the participants who were from the University of Malaya participated in the think-aloud protocols followed by interviews. Another fifty participants came from universities, translation institutions, and colleges who completed the questionnaire.

From the questionnaire and interviews, the researcher reached to conclusion that for a translation to be accurate, clear, natural and effective, a translator must have the following characteristics:

1. For a translator to translate scientific texts from English to Malay or between any other pair of languages, he or she must first of all be a subject specialist so that the content of the original text is communicated accurately, clearly and naturally. If the translator is a chemistry expert, then he or she should translate mainly chemistry texts rather than texts in other sciences, because this will ensure both quality and the speed of the translation.
2. A translator must be very proficient in both the source and target languages. Mastery of the source language ensures that the meaning conveyed by the source text author is very clearly and accurately understood by the translator. Every aspect of it must be clearly interpreted by the translator. Mastery of the target language is even more important. A translated text is deemed weak if it is delivered in the target language poorly because the translator is not familiar with the grammar and nuances of the language. Thus, it is best if the target language is the translator's dominant or native language, because only such highly proficient language users will have the intuitiveness for the language and will thus be able to deliver a better translation.
3. A translator must be familiar with the basic principles of translation theory and practice. A translator's job is not only to find equivalent terms in the target language with the help of terminology lists and dictionaries, but he or she must be able to deliver the translation according to the rules, style, and grammar of the target language so that the translation does not sound awkward and unnatural. The translated version must be delivered in a manner that sounds natural and smooth-flowing and is meaningful to the target reader. According to Ainon Muhammad (1979:12), an author on translation, a good translator must be a subject specialist, be good in the source language, even better at the target language, and must have received training in translation theory and practice. The researcher would like to add that if a translator wishes to translate scientific texts, then he or she must also receive science training. About 84% of the translators in this study were Malays, and they confirmed the fact that it is an advantage for them to be able to translate into their own mother tongue, because they know how the language ought to be written and how it should sound.
4. A good translator must have empathy for his or her target readers. He or she must ensure that the translated product is appropriate to the intelligence and proficiency levels of the target reader. A text translated for primary school students must cater to their intelligence and language proficiency level, and a text translated for university students must be suited to their level of comprehension. Once the translated text fulfils these criteria, the target readers will find it easy to follow the concepts, processes and other ideas expressed in the translated text and these reader-friendly translated texts help achieve the commercial or other purpose of the translation. In other words, translators must know the skopos or purpose of their translation task.
5. A translator must be committed and disciplined. The translation task commissioned to him or her must be completed by the deadline given so that the information that is translated does not become outdated and the user of the translation is properly served.
6. A good translator must be aware of the culture of both the source and target language readers. In this way, he or she will be able to translate to the target language based on the culture of the target readers and thus facilitate the reading and understanding of the translated text by the target readers.
7. An effective translator must learn to divide the workload among his colleagues who are subject specialists when translating voluminous academic books or long documents in the field of science and technology so that the process of translation can be speeded up and thus the readers are updated with the latest in these fields.
8. An effective translator should have all the necessary translation tools such as monolingual, bilingual and subject dictionaries, thesauri, terminology lists, a computer, a printer etc. available while translating so that no time is wasted searching for them while translating.
9. A translator must be aware of the whole translation process so that he or she will be able to translate quickly, accurately, clearly and naturally to the target language. Robinson (1997:49) has proposed that the translator is a learner and he suggests that "translation is an intelligent activity involving complex processes of conscious and unconscious learning." The researcher agrees with his proposal and also with the statement that translation is basically a problem-solving task. Robinson (1997:51) suggests that "translation is an intelligent activity, requiring creative problem-solving in novel, textual, social, and cultural conditions." A translator should know that translation is a learning activity and it involves the use of the main direct (memory, cognitive and compensation) and indirect (metacognitive, affective and social) language-learning strategies proposed by Oxford (1990). A translator who uses these strategies will be able to perform a good translation.
10. An effective translator must be aware that writing and translating involve similar features. The writing stages involve determining the message content (what?) and general purpose of the message (why?), defining the recipients (who?) and function (expected reaction of the recipients), planning the amount and order of content (What is assumed) and the realisation (what is expressed linguistically and what by some other means). The preparatory phase for writing involves the choice of text type (letter, novel, literary, non-literary, expository, informative, argumentative etc.). Here the writer must consider the format, publication, circulation, presentation involving the questions—where?, when? how? and the writer also must consider the alternative modes of communication. In addition to considering the above, the writer, according to Sager (1994:186), also must determine the structure, division of the written material into chapters, headings and paragraphs. This will lead to the message production. Sager (1994:186) suggests that the writer must evaluate, revise, modify and finally present his written work for publication. Like writing, translating too involves these stages—identification of the SL document, identification of intention, interpretation of specification and cursory reading and choice of TL text type and the other preparatory activities as in writing and original work. The researcher agrees with Sager's (1994) suggestion that writing and translation share similar features. In fact, the researcher is of the opinion that of the four skills in language learning, writing seems to come closest to translation. The researcher also agrees with Smith-Worthington and Jefferson (2005:80) in that the process of writing involves planning (prewriting, shaping, researching), drafting, revising and copy-editing (proofreading and publishing). She also agrees with Smith-Worthington and Jefferson's (2005:84) suggestion that the three features of writing are as follows:
    1. Writing is recursive or circular in nature—it is a backward and forward process. The recursive nature means that the thinking process sometimes circles back to earlier stages.
    2. Writing takes time—time is needed for ideas to emerge and develop. Different stages have their own activities. It takes sufficient time to complete a document.
    3. Writing is different for everyone—it varies from one person to the next. This is because people are different, their thinking processes and learning styles vary. A person writes to fit his or her personality and thinking style.
11. A good translator must be aware of the importance of cognitive information processing of texts so that they can be accurately understood, processed and transformed by their cognitive system.
12. Based on the researcher's experience as a translator, on her discussions with other translators, and on this research, the researcher strongly feels that the above writing processes and the three features of writing put forward by Smith-Worthington and Jefferson (2005) can be extended to the process of translation. Here too we see a close parallelism between writing and translating because they share similar features and approaches.

A competent translator must be aware of the process of translation to make effective knowledge transfer from one language to another possible. From the feedback obtained from the five participants who took part in the think-aloud protocols and interviews, the researcher discovered that the main direct and indirect strategies proposed by Oxford (1990) were used by them while translating. These strategies are shown in Table 1 on the next page. From the TAPs analysis using the inductive method, the researcher matched her analysis of the TAPs transcriptions to Oxford's (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) and found three additional strategies used by the participants which were not present in Oxford's SILL. The new findings comprise one metacognitive and two cognitive strategies. The three new strategies comprise the following:

1. Stating one's own beliefs on how to translate and giving the reasons supporting them (metacognitive strategy).

1. "Now that I know the meaning in my head, I shall translate it using my own words in Malay so that the original meaning is not lost. I do not believe in and do not practice word-for-word translation. I prefer understanding first before translating," and
2. "I don't translate word-for-word. Being a Malay, I have language intuitiveness and upon further reading, I always refine my translated work."

1. Practicing (repeating, formally practicing with sounds and writing systems, recognising and using formulas and patterns, recombining and practicing naturalistically.
2. Receiving and sending messages
   (getting the idea quickly, using resources for receiving and sending messages.)
3. Analysing and reasoning (reasoning deductively, analysing expressions, analysing contrastively (across languages), translating, transferring)
4. Creating structure for input and output (taking notes, summarising, highlighting)

1. Centering your learning (overviewing and linking with already known material, paying attention, delaying speech production to focus on listening)
2. Arranging and planning (finding out about language, organising, setting goals and objectives, identifying the purpose of a language task, planning for a language task, seeking practice opportunities)
3. Evaluating (self-monitoring, self—evaluating)

2. Affective Strategies

4. Lowering your anxiety (using progressive relaxation, deep breathing or meditation, using music, using laughter)
5. Encouraging yourself (making positive statements, taking risks wisely, rewarding yourself)
6. Taking your emotional temperature (listening to your body, using a checklist, writing a language learning diary, discussing your feelings with someone else)

3. Social Strategies

7. Asking questions (asking for clarification or verification, asking for correction)
8. Cooperating with others (cooperating with peers, cooperating with proficient users of the language)
9. Empathising with others (developing cultural understanding, becoming aware of others' thoughts and feelings)

The first two columns represent the number and types of strategies used, that is both the direct and indirect strategies and the remaining five columns in Table 2 represent the cases while the rows represent the types of strategies used. A tick was put in the column next to the strategy if the strategy was used by the participants for this study, while a cross was put if the strategy was not used by them. The strategies used which are marked with an asterisk mark and bolded are the additional strategies found from this study of the process of translating scientific texts from English to Malay.