cognition-pragmatics-and-contrastive-evidence

name	cognition-pragmatics-and-contrastive-evidence
kind	skill
status	ready
description	Review how cognitive and contrastive-pragmatic evidence is used — admitting process research only where it clarifies comprehension or transfer, treating verbal reports and neuroimaging as limited evidence, and triangulating pragmatic claims across data types. Use when a cognition or contrastive-pragmatics claim underlies a quality judgement; the descriptive-norm reconstruction it informs goes to descriptive-studies-and-translational-norms.
provenance	{"principles":["P004","P009","P015","P024","P088","P099","P124","P132"],"claims":["C00001","C00014","C00058","C00059","C00060","C00243","C00244","C00245","C00246","C00247","C00248","C00249","C00250","C00251","C00252","C00253"],"evidence":[],"source_anchors":[],"authored_from_digest":"53cffdd0611b9f22827b5040e2698d37233ba2dd80ab52ac006cdcde093ec21d"}

Cognition Pragmatics And Contrastive Evidence

Purpose

This skill reviews how cognitive and contrastive-pragmatic evidence is used in a quality assessment. It admits cognitive translation research only where it clarifies comprehension, transfer, or decision making; treats verbal reports, behavioural measures, and neuroimaging as limited evidence that cannot alone establish underlying cognition; and analyses translations as discourse utterances whose illocutionary force depends on context, triangulating contrastive pragmatic claims across data types.

When to use

• Cognitive or process research (verbal reports, keylogging, neuroimaging) is being used to certify a translation's underlying processing rather than to clarify comprehension.
• A German-English or other cross-linguistic pragmatic difference (directness, content orientation, routine, justification) is asserted without contrastive evidence.
• A translation is analysed as isolated sentence correspondence rather than as a context-dependent discourse utterance.
• A contrastive pragmatic claim rests on a single method and needs triangulating across elicited, retrospective, meta-pragmatic, and naturalistic data.

Procedure

1. Recognize that expert translators may use either conceptual processing or more direct transcoding, so process assumptions should be evidence-based rather than presumed (P004).
2. Use cognitive translation research to inform TQA only where it clarifies comprehension, transfer, problem solving, decision making, reconstitution, and bilingual pragmatics (P009).
3. Treat verbal reports, behavioural process measures, and neuroimaging as limited evidence that cannot by itself establish underlying cognition or translation quality (P015).
4. Treat German-English pragmatic differences such as directness, content orientation, self-reference, routine use, and explicit justification as corpus- and study-bound tendencies rather than fixed national traits (P024).
5. Analyze translations as discourse utterances whose illocutionary force depends on context, not as isolated sentence correspondences (P088).
6. Triangulate contrastive pragmatic evidence using elicited tasks, retrospective data, meta-pragmatic judgements, naturalistic data, and varied authority/familiarity relations (P099).
7. Integrate social-contextual and cognitive perspectives as complements, while keeping the assessment anchored in the textual evidence available for the source and target texts (P124).
8. Analyze discourse openings, closings, supportive strategies, gambits, requests, complaints, directness, politeness, roles, rights, and obligations when diagnosing pragmatic differences (P132).

Inputs

• The cognitive/process or contrastive-pragmatic evidence cited and the discourse-level function it is being used to judge.
• The reasoning offered for the decision under review: the corpus, the orientation, the brief, and any quality claim made.

Output

Per finding: flaw, principle, correction, trade-off, next step — highest-impact first. Reviews the analysis, not the translation or the publication decision.

Anti-patterns to flag

• Treating a verbal report, keylogging trace, or neuroimaging finding as proof of what the translator actually did or how good the result is, when the same data can only support a narrower claim about comprehension, transfer, or decision making, never quality on its own (P004, P009, P015).
• Labeling a directness / content-orientation / self-reference / routine-use / justification gap as a fixed German-vs-English national trait, instead of the narrower, corpus- and study-bound tendency the data actually supports (P024).
• Diagnosing a pragmatic mismatch from a general impression of "tone" or "politeness" instead of checking the specific discourse sites — openings, closings, supportive moves, gambits, requests, complaints — where the difference actually shows up (P132).
• Scoring pragmatic equivalence sentence-by-sentence (does target sentence X "match" source sentence X) rather than asking whether the translated utterance carries the same illocutionary force in its discourse context (P088).
• Accepting a single retrospective interview or one elicited-task result as settling a contrastive-pragmatic claim, when it needs corroborating naturalistic data or a different authority/familiarity relation before being treated as established (P099).
• Letting a cognitive or social-contextual explanation for a translation choice run past what the source/target text itself shows, rather than treating cognition and context as complements anchored in the available textual evidence (P124).

References

See ../../references/translation-quality-principles-index.md for the full principle catalogue grouped by skill, and ../../references/translation-quality-evidence-notes.md for how these principles are grounded and kept faithful to the sources.

Provenance

Derived from P004, P009, P015, P024, P088, P099, P124, P132, grounded in the distillation-only source House, Translation Quality Assessment. The frontmatter provenance block lists the exact principle and claim ids, which resolve into principles/principles.yaml and analysis/claims.jsonl.