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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 10:4 (2020) ► pp.559–586

Translation ambiguity in Mandarin-English bilinguals

Translation production differences in concrete, abstract, and emotion words

| United States International University – Africa
| Tennessee Technological University
| University at Albany, State University of New York

Research focused on the cognitive processes surrounding bilingual language representation has revealed the important role that translation ambiguity plays in how languages are stored in memory (Tokowicz & Kroll, 2007). In addition, translation of emotionally related information has been shown to be challenging because a direct translation does not always exist (Basnight-Brown & Altarriba, 2014). The focus of the current study was to explore the processing of ambiguous words for translations that differ in orthography. In Experiment 1, Chinese-English bilinguals translated concrete and abstract words that differed in the number of translations across languages. In Experiment 2, emotion words were introduced into the context, in order to examine differences in emotion translation across languages. The results revealed that words with a single translation were produced faster and more accurately than words that had multiple translations. Finally, translation of emotional stimuli was faster when translating Chinese words as compared to English words.

Keywords: translation, emotion, Chinese
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Implications of translation ambiguity in bilinguals
    • 1.2Processing differences in concrete, abstract, and emotion stimuli
    • 1.3The role of translation ambiguity and concreteness effects
  • 2.Methods
    • Participants
    • Stimuli
    • Procedure
  • 3.Results
  • 4.Experiment 2 – Methods
    • Participants
    • Stimuli
    • Procedure
  • 5.Experiment 2 – Results
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
Published online: 13 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17037.bas
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