A Study On Translation Cognitive Mechanisms From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

As a social activity, translation appears with the establishment of human society andbecomes more and more complicated with the development of it. For a long time, peoplehave paid more attention to the practice field of translation, and the cognitive studies haverelatively fallen behind. Because the translation activity is conducted within humanbrains, it is hard to study intuitively and clearly discover the cognitive essence oftranslation. If we study the cognition of translation, we can broaden the translation studyinto a complete theory system and make a reasonable and effective explanation to someof the questions in translation field.In this paper, it carries out a deep research into the cognitive process of translation.Firstly, it explains the relationships between translation and cognition by analyzinglanguage using and cognitive process, the importance of translator’s cognition andtranslation process and translator’s cognition. Then, it makes a full study about cognitiveprocess of translation from five aspects: the motivation of translation; decoding oftranslation; the middle process; recoding; the editing of translation. So, it gets the resultthat the translation process is just one kind of cognitive process.In recent years, as a new cognitive theory, the conceptual integration theory has gotmore and more attentions. Because the structure of this theory is dynamic and uniform,people use it to analyze various cognitive activities and phenomena. The essence of thetheory is to establish a conceptual integration network by the inter-mappings among itsfour mental spaces. The existence of generic space makes the different cultural schematahave something in common and the emergent structure can explain the creativity ofcognition.With the powerful ability of conceptual integration theory to illustrate cognition, thispaper plans to study human’s translation activities from the perspective of cognitivelinguistics, by combining the conceptual integration theory with the translation cognitiveprocess. It also targets to build a conceptual integration system for translation and toexplore the internal cognitive mechanisms of translation. Besides, this paper puts forwardsome objective translation strategies by discussing some translation problems. The inter-mappings among mental spaces give us a clear and intuitive view aboutthe translation activities. The existence of emergent structure explains the rationality andlegality of multi-translations and re-translations. Nevertheless, as a theory system, theconceptual integration needs development and perfection, so the subject of this paper willalso continuously deepen with the extension of this theory and becomes a study field withother researches.