From Representation to Enactment: The ABC Framework of the Translating Mind

2025-11-20

AI Summary

This study addresses the limitations of traditional representationalist mental models in accounting for the dynamism and embodiment of translation. Methodologically, it integrates extended mind theory, radical embodied cognition, predictive processing, and active inference to propose a non-representational ABC framework (Affect–Behavior–Cognition), reconceptualizing translation as an emergent, meaning-coconstruction practice arising from continuous brain–body–environment interactions, with real-time coupling among affect, behavior, and cognition. The contribution is threefold: (1) it transcends the static linguistic equivalence paradigm by offering the first systematic dynamic modeling of translation’s mental mechanisms; (2) it demonstrates that translation competence is not instantiated through retrieval of pre-stored representations but is instead generated in real time via perception–action cycles situated in sociocultural contexts; and (3) it advances a novel theoretical pathway for translation cognition research grounded in embodiment, interactivity, and process orientation. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Analogy
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change, and Causality
• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution

Abstract

Building on the Extended Mind (EM) theory and radical enactivism, this article suggests an alternative to representation-based models of the mind. We lay out a novel ABC framework of the translating mind, in which translation is not the manipulation of static interlingual correspondences but an enacted activity, dynamically integrating affective, behavioral, and cognitive (ABC) processes. Drawing on Predictive Processing and (En)Active Inference, we argue that the translator's mind emerges, rather than being merely extended, through loops of brain-body-environment interactions. This non-representational account reframes translation as skillful participation in sociocultural practice, where meaning is co-created in real time through embodied interaction with texts, tools, and contexts.

Problem

• Proposes an alternative to representation-based models of cognition
• Develops a framework integrating affective behavioral cognitive processes
• Reframes translation as embodied sociocultural meaning co-creation

Innovation

• Non-representational framework integrating affective behavioral cognitive
• Translation as enacted activity through brain-body-environment loops
• Meaning co-created via embodied interaction with sociocultural elements