ABSTRACT

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the development of psycholinguistic enquiries into the study of Chinese translation. The term ‘Chinese translation’ used here, and as defined for this volume, means all kinds of translation that involves Chinese as one of the language pairs. As there is not a separate chapter on the survey of psycholinguistics of Chinese interpreting in this volume, yet interpreting, as a form of oral translation, is rightly categorised as human translation by Holmes (1972/2000), we feel obliged to include the psycholinguistic inquiries into Chinese interpreting in our discussion. The default meaning of translation, however, is still taken to be written translation, while other translation modalities are specified when necessary.