Abstract:

It is a long-standing issue in translation as to how to understand the transfer of indigenous concepts from source to target. Being source-bound, these concepts do not have ready interpretations in the target system and therefore are foreign or alien to the target community. This paper approaches the issue from a cognitive perspective. 499 examples are retrieved from English-Chinese and Chinese-English parallel corpora and are examined for how they are actually translated. The resulting patterns show that while trans-coding is the dominating strategy for sensitive texts, a more flexible pattern including paraphrasing, substitution and deletion is observed for fictional texts. From the cognitive perspective, such outcomes are not so much ad hoc, piece-meal or random as one might think, but rather are determined by the constraints on how the cognitive systems (of the translator) may process bilingual data.