Abstract: This article aims to advance a complementary approach to the directional effect on professional translators’ rendition of conceptual barriers.To this end, a corpus-assisted cognitive approach within the integrated economic processing framework is adopted to identify the textual translating-strategy patterns of professional translators’ rendition of metaphorical expressions (as conceptual barriers) for further exploring their processing routes.The present study involves a bidirectional multi-translational parallel corpus encompassing Chinese source texts and English target texts translated by L1- and L2-English professional translators respectively.The results reveal that translation direction exerts influence on professional translators’ processing routes, and that such directionality is regulated by the processing economy and influenced by grammatical complexity, semantic implicitness, and specific contexts.These findings may shed light on translation education and practice.The authors suggest that a corpus-assisted cognitive approach to investigating the interplay of professional translator’s cognitive processing routes should be complementary to behavioral and neurocognitive ones.