Abstract: Bilingual processing requires more cognitive resources than monolingual, and translation cognitive processing is a complex subject in bilingual processing. Therefore, exploring translation cognitive processing from the perspective of cognitive resource allocation is helpful to reveal the neural mechanism of bilinguals’ cognitive processing. This paper attempts to explore the differences in cognitive resources allocation and cognitive processing patterns in different topic familiarity tasks by triangulating eye-tracking, retrospection and questionnaire. The findings are as follows: 1) compared with the unfamiliar topic task, the participants’ overall cognitive resources and those allocated to source text comprehension and online information seeking in the familiar topic task were significantly less, but the cognitive resources devoted to translation production were significantly more. 2) Participants’ attention shifts between source text comprehension and online information seeking were significantly more than that between translation production and online information seeking, and they tended to adopt the cognitive processing pattern of “source text reading to online information seeking to source text reading”, which is stable and not affected by topic familiarity. 3）A translation process model based on online information seeking was proposed according to Bell’s model. This study contributes to the theoretical and empirical research of translation process (TPR), and provides implications for L2 teaching and translator training.