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12 The Linguist Vol/58 No/2 2019 ciol.org.uk/tl FEATURES the visual word form area of the brain (left inferior temporal lobe) than reading or translating Chinese. This suggests that English, as the L2, complicated both tasks at the reading and recognition stage, causing participants to recruit more cognitive effort and increase activation in the visual word form area. In addition, sight translation proved to be more demanding than reading, and activated more regions in both the domain-specific and domain-general areas. This result is consistent with the findings of previous research. Finally, we found that FT is more demanding and requires further cognitive resources, causing more activation in the cortex areas responsible for conceptual mediation and representation. This finding supports the RHM from the perspective of English-Chinese sentence translation. Challenges and future prospects Cognitive neuroscience, like a scalpel, has opened up an effective way to probe the mechanisms of the translating brain. The findings from research in this area can provide additional insights into the developmental context of translation, and reveal some links between translation competencies and the fundamental neuropsychological functions. For instance, the finding that domain-general areas of the brain feature extensively in translation supports the idea that improving executive processing and attention/concentration ability may help to enhance lexical retrieval and information processing during extreme language use, such as simultaneous interpreting. Just as Maria Tymoczko predicted, the cognitive neuroscience of translation will be one of the most important areas of future Translation Studies. 6 However, due to its comparatively short history, the high demand for cutting-edge facilities, the unnatural research environment, and the expertise required to set up neuropsychological experiments and interpret the imaging data, such research remains limited. The future of this kind of research will broadly lie in interdisciplinary projects, in which translation scholars are more proactive, working closely with neuroscientists and molecular biologists to overcome the difficulties of data collection and analysis in order to illuminate the 'black box' of human translation. Many more questions and hypotheses await examination. These include topics such as perception and memory in translation, translator training and brain plasticity, translation disorders in brain-lesioned bilinguals, and the interpreter advantage hypothesis. Notes 1 L1 refers to one's first/native language; L2 to one's second/most proficient foreign language 2 Kroll, JF and Stewart, E (1994) 'Category Interference in Translation and Picture Naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations'. In Journal of Memory and Language. 33: 149-174 3 Lei, MM et al (2014) 'Neural Basis of Language Switching in the Brain: fMRI evidence from Korean-Chinese early bilinguals'. In Brain and Language. 138: 12-18 4 Hervais-adelman, a, Moser-Mercer, B, Michel, CM and Golestani, N (2015) 'fMRI of Simultaneous Interpretation Reveals the Neural Basis of Extreme Language Control'. In Cerebral Cortex. 25(12): 4727-4739 5 Hervais-adelman, a, Moser-Mercer, B and Golestani, N (2015) 'Brain Functional Plasticity associated with the Emergence of Expertise in Extreme Language Control'. In NeuroImage. 114: 264-274 6 Tymoczko, M (2012) 'The Neuroscience of Translation'. In Target. 24(1): 83-102 Basal ganglia: Brain area that functions in procedural learning, habit learning, eye movements, cognition and emotion. Caudate nucleus: Component of the basal ganglia (see above) associated with motor processes, which functions on procedural learning, associative learning and inhibitory control of action. Domain-general region: Brain areas that activate across a broad range of tasks. Domain-specific region: Brain areas that function on some particular tasks. Putamen: Component of the basal ganglia regulating movements and functioning in reinforcement learning and implicit learning. EEG (electroencephalography): The oldest functional brain imaging technique, still widely used to provide real-time measurements of brain activity. fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging): Measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. fNIRS (Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy): Measures brain activity through blood-flow responses associated with neuron behaviour. PET (positron-emission tomography): Brain imaging that measures blood flow, offering good spatial resolution and measuring aspects of brain function. GLOSSARY © SHuTTERSTOCK