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Abstract Drawing on Talmy’s macro event theory in cognitive semantics, this study probes into the differences between Chinese and English in the encoding of caused state change events, as well as the Chinese-English translation strategies involved. The analysis of the novels in Chinese and their English translations indicates that 1) Chinese texts and English texts adopt different strategies of causal chain splicing as a result of the different mechanisms of attention in Chinese and English. Notably, result events in both languages are foregrounded in causal chains due to the frequent windowing of attention; and that 2) The translation process of caused state change events includes the process of segmentation of semantic elements, reorganization of semantic elements, and re-lexicalization. The study proposes two translation strategies, namely causal chain splicing and causal chain segmentation. The splicing and segmentation of causal chains are affected by differences in typological properties, lexical accessibility, and lexical collocation between the two languages.
Key words: caused state change events; re-lexicalization; window of attention; causal chain splicing; causal chain segmentation
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