Cognitive Processing Routes in Translation:An Empirical Study Based on the Self-built Chinese-English Parallel Corpus

In the past four decades research on cognitive processes of translation has made remarkable progress since it borrowed theories and paradigms from such neighboring disciplines as psychology and neurolinguistics.One of the most important topics that have been much debated concerns the cognitive processing routes that mediate the bilingual processes of transferring the source language into the target language.At the crux of the debate is which processing route,the form-based or the meaning-based,dominates translation and interpreting.Based on a self-built Chinese-English parallel corpus,this paper investigates the patterns of cognitive processing routes among three translation modes,namely,consecutive interpreting,written translation,and subtitle translation.It is found that the meaning-based processing route dominates the three above-mentioned translation modes.It is also found that consecutive interpreting resembles subtitling translation but differs from written translation in the processing patterns,indicating that the meaning-based route plays a more important role when there is no time or space constraint.