Introduction

This chapter takes a look at the interlingual processes involved in a typical multilingual production task that is to say a written translation, a task performed not only by professional people (experts) but a common activity for anybody functioning in a bilingual/multilingual context, any language user in fact. The type of task has been selected, in the first instance, on the basis of the degree of non-automaticity involved in it: translation – and especially written translation – is mainly a controlled process, in which conscious translation strategies and conscious language choices are being applied to result in the best possible text equivalent in the target language. Second, the surface language constellation involved in the task presented in this study, that is the language of input – the source text in the subject's L2 and the language of output – the target language L3, allows us to observe the activation of the three languages of the subject's competence. Translating from L1 into L2 or L3 does not always activate all three languages (as observed in my earlier study – Gabryś-Barker, 2005). This language constellation makes it possible to observe crosslinguistic consultations performed by the subject. Third, translation is a process which, by means of simultaneous introspection (thinking aloud verbalisations) used as the tool for data collection, can be observed on-line, which allows subjects to comment on what actually happens at different stages of text transformation.

Existing studies using concurrent verbalisations often focus on lexical search processes and not so much on syntactic processing. The major purpose of this study is to describe on the basis of a thinking aloud protocol language processing at the level of syntax. It will, however, also show the interface between lexis and syntax. Both lexis and the syntactic properties of a given text contribute to its reformulation into another language 'equivalent'.