Translational Ethics from a Cognitive Perspective: A Corpus-Assisted Study on Multiple English-Chinese Translations

The Dominant Cognitive Processing Route in Literary and Subtitle Translation: A Case Study of <i>Wolf Totem</i>

“…In the translation process, there are two cognitive processing routes for bilingual transfer: the form-based processing route and the meaning-based processing route [8,10,16]. The controversial issue of dominance regarding the workings of these routes has not been well addressed in the field of subtitle translation, although empirical evidence has been found for written translation [4,14], consecutive interpreting [7,17] and simultaneous interpreting [8]. In previous studies, the dominant pattern of cognitive processing routes has been shown to be related with many variables, such as the text type, translation mode, and the nature of the translated target.…”

“…Some scholars argue that the form-based processing route dominates translation, while others argue the opposite view. One particular group of researchers who have attempted to address this issue are those from translation studies, such as [3,4,7,8,14,18,22].…”

“…These results corroborate part of the findings of Liu, Li & He [18], who also investigated the processing patterns in professional Chinese-English consecutive interpretations. In terms of written translations, Chou, Lei, Li & He [4] explored the translation patterns for culture-specific items extracted from a self-built bilingual parallel corpus totaling approximately one million words, including an English novel, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, and its four Chinese translations. Transcoding dominates the use of translation strategies for CSI-related units in four individual translations.…”

“…Second, the conflicting findings are controversial, implying that the issue of processing routes needs to be empirically investigated further. Third, although other evidence concerning this controversial issue in Chinese-English translation has also been collected in recent years, such as [4,13,17,23], there are few systematic studies comparing literary and subtitle translation from Chinese into English (CE) regarding the dominant processing patterns. Therefore, the current investigation aims to further investigate this issue by expanding the research into the area of subtitles and exploring the tendencies of translations involving Chinese and English by adopting a corpus-assisted approach.…”

“…To be more specific, culture-specific items (CSIs), i.e., those items alien to the target system (system refers to the language and culture), were selected as a way to determine how the bilingual transfer is done during the act of translating. In particular, a bilingual parallel corpus is used to infer translators' or interpreters' underlying processing routes via the extraction of the rendering patterns of the CSIs, thus called a corpus-assisted approach to process route research, which has already been applied in some of the previous studies [4,14,15].…”