A Study Of Translation Directionality

Translation directionality refers to whether translators are working from a foreign language into their mother tongue or vice versa. It could exert an influence on many aspects in translation/interpreting practices, including the linguistic style and textual effect of the final translation products or the cognitive load involved in the translation process, the strategies in interpreting, etc.Currently, there are many approaches to the influence of translation directionality in various aspects, including the corpus-based studies aiming to probe into the linguistic and stylistic features of the translated texts resulting from different translation directions, and the experimental studies adopted to investigate the cognitive load involved in the translation process or the strategies in interpreting from different directions, etc. However, the studies of its influence on the textual effect (or the potential textual effect to be specific) of the translated texts, one important aspect influencing the target readers’understanding, is still lacking. To fill this gap and provide more data supportive for the existing empirical studies, the present study, by conducting a detailed textual analysis of both the essay Congcong and its two English translations within the framework of cognitive grammar and by focusing on the relationship between the two participants in the discourse world manifested in two important aspects of textual salience on the general level (i.e. profile/base organization and trajector/landmark asymmetry), aims to explore whether the textual presentation of the translations resulting from different directions would potentially point to similar conceptualization in readers’mind and further compare the textual effect thus realized with the textual effect presented by the original.The results thus obtained in the two aspects mentioned-above show that, despite a relatively higher degree of recognition for the practices translating into one’s mother tongue than translating out of one’s mother tongue, yet in the case in the present study, the translation directionality has not exerted obvious influence on the (potential) cognitive textual effect realized by textual presentation/salience of the translated texts. Meanwhile, the present case is just a special case among so many cases in the domain of translation directionality, with different genres, size or positions in the literary or culture system, so more future researches in this respect is expected in the future for the possible solid conclusion.