Cognitive Process Of Translation Based On Fillmore’s Scenes And Frames Theory

It is documented that the activity of translation can be traced back to the year2000BC, however, it was only several decades before translation studies was founded to make a further research. In1974, the American translation theorist James Stratton Holmes, who is considered as the founder of the translation studies, puts forward the three branches of the Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS), including the product-oriented, function-oriented and process-oriented studies. And the first two has been made the greatest progress while for the latter one, there is still a long way to go in order to decrypt the "black little box" in the translator’s brain. The author of this paper tries to solve this problem by developing five chapters, coupled with related theories and practical survey. In the first Chapter, the author gives a brief introduction to the background and purpose of research as well as the methodology adopted. Chapter Two illustrates the domestic and international status quos of cognitive process and the traditional methods of cognitive processes. Taking the Think-Aloud Protocols (TAPs) as an example, the author analyses what has been achieved and their weaknesses. Chapter Three, as the key part, is divided into two parts to deduce the model of cognitive process of translation, the first of which is about the traditional translation process, in which the author introduces easily-observed translation procedures like browsing the translation materials meanwhile analyses the inner mental processes of translation. The author points out translators basically divide a sentence into several units and complete the translation by using the grammars and experience. However, not all of the translation sentences are the copies of grammars but rather the creative translation. How translator’s mind works in creative translation is a tackle the author solves by applying to Fillmore’s Scenes and Frames semantic theory. In Chapter Four, the author makes a survey that professional translators and students majored as English translation are required to translate a Chinese text into English version and finish the questionnaires designed by the author of this paper. At the same time, the author analyses the results of subjects’choices to prove the translation cognitive model, concluded by the author, helpful and practical. At last, the author makes the conclusion.