Socio-Cognitive Correlation Between Translation Attitudes and Translation of Motion Event Expressions: Examining its Presence in Chinese-French Translation and the Role of Measurement Approaches and Proficiency Levels

Abstract

This study investigates the socio-cognitive relationship between learners’ attitudes toward translation norms and their translation of motion event expressions, a cognitively and typologically sensitive domain. Three research questions guide the inquiry: (1) Do target-oriented translation attitudes correlate with target-like translation of motion event expressions? (2) Do explicit (self-report) and implicit (choice-based) measures of attitudes differ in predictive strength? (3) Does L2 proficiency (beginner vs. intermediate) moderate this relationship? Based on the motion event typology and the constrained communication framework, this study elicits Chinese-French bilingual participants’ translations of motion event expressions and collects data through a questionnaire measuring translation attitudes and proficiency. Multinomial logistic regression is applied to examine the relationships among motion event encoding patterns, translation attitudes, and proficiency. Results reveal a positive correlation between target-oriented attitudes and target-like motion event encoding patterns, with implicit measures showing stronger predictive power than explicit measures. Crucially, this correlation is stronger among intermediate learners than among beginner learners, suggesting that sufficient proficiency might be necessary for attitudes to be realized in translation behavior. These findings highlight the interactive role of social attitudes and cognitive constraints in shaping translation and underscore the importance of multi-method attitude assessment and proficiency-sensitive analysis in translation process research.