Bilingual Mental Lexicon and Translation: A Psycholinguistic Study of Bengali-English Language Pairs

The study explores the cognitive processes involved in translating between two languages through a psycholinguistic approach, specifically by examining the bilingual mental lexicon. More precisely, the study intends to investigate how bilinguals’ ability to perform translation tasks is impacted by their knowledge of both languages and the factors that influence this process. The findings indicate that a person’s mental capacity to access words affects their ability to translate from one linguistic framework to another. Several factors come into play throughout this task, including proficiency level, targeted use case contexts, and other situational variables. Bilingual speakers vary in proficiency level, influencing which language paradigm they rely on the most robustly throughout the task. The study addresses disconnects in translation practices by improving our understanding of mechanisms impacting translator techniques and mental word representations. The study has practical implications for language education, processing, and translation.