Birgitta Englund Dimitrova

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at Stockholm University

Allocation and management of working memory resources are crucial for successful interpreting. A number of studies have found clear indications that simultaneous interpreters have larger working memory capacity, at least in some areas, than other bilinguals. To date, no studies have focused on the working memory of dialogue interpreters. The study...

In 1759, the Transactions of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences published a description of the southern Swedish parish of Ålhem, written by Anders Wijkström. The description focuses on the natural resources and economy of the parish, but also describes in some detail a parishioner who is deaf and communicates with signs; this is presumably the f...

Recensioner av: Cultural Mapping and Musical Diversity av Britta Sweers & Sarah M Ross (eds). Dance Legacies of Scotland: The True Glen Orchy Kick av Mats Melin & Jennifer Schoonover Folklore Revival Movements in Europe post 1950: Shifting Contexts and Perspectives av Daniela Stavělová och Theresa Jill Buckland (red.) Foundations of Hungarian Ethno...

“The Father of Swedish music” Johan Helmich Roman (1694-1758) was a composer and leader of the orchestra of the Royal Swedish Court, but also a translator working from several languages. An early composition of his is the orchestra suite called Golovin Music, composed for a festivity organized in Stockholm by the Russian ambassador N. F. Golovin, t...

This study addresses cognitive aspects of turn-taking and the role of experience in dialogue interpreting, by investigating the temporal and textual properties of the coupled turn (i.e. the original utterance and its interpretation). A comparison was made using a video-recorded scripted role-play between eight interpreters, with Swedish-French or S...

[Engl.] This bibliography lists books on translation and interpreting, written by authors living or working in Sweden. In the period covered by the bibliography, 1986 – 2015, Translation Studies underwent a strong development as a discipline, not only in Sweden but also worldwide. The bibliography offers a picture of research done in Sweden during...

This paper is a case study of cognitive load in consecutive interpreting. The data is taken from an example of dual role mediation in an entertainment show on Swedish TV, where the host interviews a Russian-speaking guest while at the same time functioning as interpreter for the Swedish viewers. The assumption of the study is that performing such d...

Language proficiency of dialogue interpreters, who typically work in the public service sector, is an under-researched area. Unlike as in the case of conference interpreters, there is no generally accepted definition of proficiency levels of working languages for dialogue interpreters. This article discusses language proficiency in dialogue interpr...

This case study examines a Swedish TV interview with a Soviet pop singer in 1985 where the talk show host, who is both a trained interpreter and an experienced media journalist, acts as a dual-role mediator, interviewing and interpreting at the same time. The analysis is contextualized within the political and military relations between Sweden and...

Reembedding Translation Process Research is a rich collection of empirical research papers investigating important new facets of the relationship between translation and cognition. The common thread running through the collection is the notion of “re-embedding” the acts of translating and interpreting—and the ways we understand them. That is, they...

(abstract in Swedish after the English one) The paper deals with dialect in translation of children’s literature, analyzing translations into Russian of Swedish author Astrid Lindgren’s book Emil in Lönneberga. Three types of data are analyzed: a) 20 different translations into Russian (2 published, 18 done by Russian university students of Swedis...

This document describes the background, aims, proposed research questions, and activities so far, of a project, started in 2014, on the cognitive processes of the community interpreter.

The aim of this paper is to discuss some developments in empirical translation research with an experimental and cognitive perspective. The focus is on the activities and research of the network TREC (Translation, Research, Empiricism, Cognition). The network was formed in 2011, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and led...

Retrospection is one of the few research methods equally suitable for studying the processes involved in both translation and interpreting. At the first workshop on research methods in process-oriented research (Graz 2009), we presented the results of a pilot study of retrospection as a research method, published as Englund Dimitrova & Tiselius (20...

This is an exploratory study of retrospection as a research method for investigating problems and strategies both in simultaneous interpreting and in translation. It is based on data from six subjects, three performing a translation task, three an interpreting task, with retrospection cued by the source text/source speech. In the coding of the retr...