A Study Of The Cognitive Process In Translating Grammatical Constructions From The Grammatical Blending Perspective

The study of translation has a very long history. The majority of existing translation literature is product-oriented, centering around the equivalence between the source and target texts. Also there is a small amount that is process-oriented, focusing on the psychological or cognitive process in translation. However, little research exists on the interface between the cognitive and linguistic aspects of the translation process. The current study, from the perspective of conceptual and linguistic blending (i.e. grammatical blending), holds the view that translation is the result of the interaction between language and cognition, various texts employed in translation are the products of dynamic blending operations, and translation is the process of interpreting and reconstructing the dynamic blending operations. Based on the analysis of the cognitive operations underlying the translation of the English caused-motion construction into Chinese, this study aims at providing a framework for a unified account of the cognitive operations in the translation of grammatical constructions. Meanwhile, this study attempts to unveil the similarities and differences of grammatical blending operations in the generation of English and Chinese caused-motion sentences, and furthermore, the nature of their differences in representation.From the perspective of grammatical blending, the source and target texts are understood as generated independently by two separate conceptual and linguistic processes of blending. The translation process first requires a conscious operation of"de-integration"(or"unpacking") of the source text into its schematic structures of communicated events conveyed by the text and linguistic input structures; the produced translation is the result of"re-blending"these discovered structures with grammatical constructions of target language. The various solutions or"strategies"employed in translation are virtually the outcome of different blending operations in target language. Translation"mismatches"result fundamentally from the differences in the conventionally-employed conceptual and linguistic blending operations licensed by the grammar of each language in conveying the same event structure.This study, exploring the cognitive operations in the translation of grammatical constructions from a brand-new perspective– grammatical blending, is expected to be conducive not only to the study of translation (including machine translation) but also to the study of linguistics and the contrastive study of English and Chinese.