He Yan, Wang Meng-Yun, Li Defeng, Yuan Zhen
Centre for Studies of Translation, Interpreting and Cognition, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau SAR, China.
These authors contributed equally to this work.
Biomed Opt Express. 2017 Nov 7;8(12):5399-5411. doi: 10.1364/BOE.8.005399. eCollection 2017 Dec 1.
Translating from Chinese into another language or vice versa is becoming a widespread phenomenon. However, current neuroimaging studies are insufficient to reveal the neural mechanism underlying translation asymmetry during Chinese/English sight translation. In this study, functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to extract the brain activation patterns associated with Chinese/English sight translation. Eleven unbalanced Chinese (L1)/English (L2) bilinguals participated in this study based on an intra-group experimental design, in which two translation and two reading aloud tasks were administered: forward translation (from L1 to L2), backward translation (from L2 to L1), L1 reading, and L2 reading. As predicted, our findings revealed that forward translation elicited more pronounced brain activation in Broca's area, suggesting that neural correlates of translation vary according to the direction of translation. Additionally, significant brain activation in the left PFC was involved in backward translation, indicating the importance of this brain region during the translation process. The identical activation patterns could not be discovered in forward translation, indicating the cognitive processing of reading logographic languages (i.e. Chinese) might recruit incongruent brain regions.
从中文翻译成另一种语言，或者反之，正成为一种普遍现象。然而，目前的神经影像学研究不足以揭示汉英视译过程中翻译不对称背后的神经机制。在本研究中，功能近红外光谱技术（fNIRS）被用于提取与汉英视译相关的大脑激活模式。基于组内实验设计，11名汉语（第一语言，L1）/英语（第二语言，L2）不平衡双语者参与了本研究，其中进行了两项翻译任务和两项朗读任务：正向翻译（从L1到L2）、反向翻译（从L2到L1）、L1朗读和L2朗读。正如预期的那样，我们的研究结果显示，正向翻译在布洛卡区引发了更明显的大脑激活，这表明翻译的神经关联会根据翻译方向而有所不同。此外，左侧前额叶皮质在反向翻译中出现了显著的大脑激活，表明该脑区在翻译过程中的重要性。在正向翻译中未发现相同的激活模式，这表明阅读表意文字语言（即中文）的认知过程可能会调用不一致的脑区。
