Abstract

There are many reference books that explain how to translate on the professional level. In reality, however, such resources only compile their methodologies in manual form. While this may be directly beneficial to those in professional translation settings, such resources do not systematize their methodologies based on disciplines or theories, and therefore do not provide explicit learning strategies of the translation processes. This paper attempts to shed light on this area by focusing on English-to-Japanese translation at the word-level. It analyzes an underlying mechanism behind the process of selecting translation equivalents (i.e. Japanese expressions) within the theoretical framework of cognitive semantics, and suggests how to teach and learn translation strategies. In order to show concrete examples of the cognitive processes of word-level translation, this paper analyzes the polysemous word “as”, since it has several different varieties of potential translation equivalents in Japanese.