Translational Ethics from a Cognitive Perspective: A Corpus-Assisted Study on Multiple English-Chinese Translations

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.