TRAILS · Translating Institutional Systems

The nature of cognition in real-life work settings has attracted the interest of scholars from different academic disciplines in the last decades. However, a professional activity that so far has received limited attention in research, despite its potential to produce considerable insight into the nature of cognition in large-scale organisations, is translation work in institutional settings. Institutional translation, e.g., in the European Union institutions, is characterized not only by institutional norms and regulations which are transferred across actors, artifacts, and time, but also by the ubiquitous use of technology. As such, it appears particularly well-suited for advancing the current knowledge of how cognitive processes, such as knowledge, remembering, and decision making, are distributed across actors in teams in institutional settings, as well as through their interactions with technology. This project aims to explore and model distributed cognitive processes by investigating social interaction and human-technology interaction in institutional translation settings, thus pushing the boundaries of current conceptualizations of distributed cognition in institutions. Ultimately, the study will result in the development of a theoretical model of distributed cognition in institutional translation settings that will inform future research into socio-cognitive aspects of cognition, interaction, and cross-linguistic communication. These research objectives will be pursued through the interdisciplinary integration of theoretical insights and methodologies from cognitive science, linguistics, anthropology, and translation studies. Specifically, it will combine ethnographic fieldwork with micro-ethnographic multi-modal interaction analysis to gather data on team interactions in the EU institutions, primarily by means of video recordings, but also with other types of discursive, naturally occurring data, such as documents produced and used in the institutions.