The Effect of Mode Integration in Sight Translation: Psychological Evidence from the Left-right Space-time Metaphor

This study explores the mechanism of mode shift in sight translation with priming experiments focusing on the effect of fictive motion and visual processing on time perspectives.The stimuli consist of English sentences describing fictive motion plus left or right visual guide; the target is sight translating of an ambiguous temporal sentence from English to Chinese (the ambiguous phrase can be translated either as "ti-qian" (advance) or as "tui-chi" (postpone).The results revealed that (1) primed by fictive motion, the proportion of "postpone" in translation slightly increased; (2) primed by fictive motion and left visual guide, the proportion of "advance" in translation went up slightly while primed by fictive motion and right visual guide, the proportion of "postpone" in translation increased significantly.The findings indicate that linguistic and visual processing affect time perspectives in the target text, as an evidence of mode integration effect in sight translation.The integration of language and visual processing, affected by experiences, has an interfering effect on sight translation.Both left and right visual guide exerted interference on left-handers and right visual guide exerted more interference on right-handers.