Abstract
This paper seeks an explanatory understanding of how such ethical labels as domestication and foreignization relate themselves to the translating process. The Processing Economy Hypothesis (PEH) is postulated to account for the patterns in multiple English-Chinese translations where culture-specific texts tend to be more “foreignized” than other texts. It is argued that in terms of bilingual processing, access to processing paths is cognitively economized and that a structure-routed path is less costly for a culture-specific text than a concept-mediated path, which is possible only with costly cognition, i.e., the translator’s conscientious and persistent interventions for preferring a “domesticated” text over source-text induced foreignness.
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Notes
- 1.
There may be cases where the boundaries between one type and another are blurred, e.g., when a loan has been integrated in the system for a very long time, but that is a notional issue that does not concern us here.
- 2.
- 3.
A textual sentence is marked by any of the seven punctuations: period, colon, semicolon, question mark, exclamation mark, dash, and eclipse mark (see He, Alien Sources 207–32).
- 4.
The literary themes are mother-daughter relationship, ethnical identity, and cultural conflicts.
- 5.
\( {\mathrm{E}}_{\mathrm{r},\mathrm{c}}=\left({\mathrm{n}}_{\mathrm{r}}*\;{\mathrm{n}}_{\mathrm{c}}\right)/{\mathrm{n}}^2 \) where r is the number of levels for one categorical variable, c is the number of levels for the other categorical variable, Er,c is the expected frequency count for level r of Variable A and level c of Variable B, nr is the total number of sample observations at level r of Variable A, nc is the total number of sample observations at level c of Variable B, and n is the total sample size.
- 6.
\( {X}^2={\left(24\hbox{--} 43.75\right)}^2/43.75+{\left(238\hbox{--} 312\right)}^2/312+\dots \dots +{\left(220\hbox{--} 281.25\right)}^2/281.25=181.086, \) the probability that a chi-square statistic with 6 degrees of freedom is more extreme than 181.086
- 7.
\( {X}^2={\left(1\hbox{--} 10.5\right)}^2/10.5+{\left(23\hbox{--} 26\right)}^2/26+\dots \dots +{\left(95\hbox{--} 129.75\right)}^2/129.75=2488.5, \) the probability that a chi-square statistic with 12 degrees of freedom is more extreme than 2488.5
- 8.
Obtained by applying CHISQ.TEST (actual_range; expected_range) with Excel.
- 9.
Most authors refer to “statistically significant” as being P < 0.05 and “statistically highly significant” as being P < 0.01 (Nuzzo 2014: 150).
- 10.
The articulatory-perceptual (AP) system, language faculty (LF), and the conceptual-intentional (CI) system are terms from Chomsky (2, 168–9).
- 11.
Conceptual mediation is assumed to involve grammatical as well as pragmatic capacities of the bilingual speaker. “Just as concepts are shaped and refined by language-specific constraints, pragmatic capacity is shaped and refined by cultural-specific implicit pragmatic conventions” (Parids, Bilingualism 18).
- 12.
We do not concern ourselves with predictably many other possibilities, e.g., the mentalese extracted from incoming complex structures is encoded in a series of outgoing simple structures. We are just presenting a frame of theoretical reference relevant to our discussion.
- 13.
The larger and deeper such pairing is in memory, the more strongly it will display itself in translating/interpreting, also known as his/her “cognitive signature” (Paradis, Implications 393–419).
- 14.
This may happen more between closely related languages (e.g., the Romance’s) as Jakobson (232–39) and Catford (28–9) claimed.
- 15.
Veteran professional SI interpreters we work with testify that this actually happens. Studies are needed. Results from case studies on translation are far from being conclusive (e.g., He, Fresh Perspective 77–90).
- 16.
Venuti did not, however, provide no empirically characterized, e.g., corpus generated, data, to support his case, as he claims that he does not believe in any empirical approach to the study of translation (Scandals 21–29).
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Chou, I.C., Lei, V.L.C., Li, D., He, Y. (2016). Translational Ethics from a Cognitive Perspective: A Corpus-Assisted Study on Multiple English-Chinese Translations. In: Seruya, T., Justo, J. (eds) Rereading Schleiermacher: Translation, Cognition and Culture. New Frontiers in Translation Studies. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47949-0_14
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