Abstract:

Military terms are words that express military concepts in a systematic way. The differences between the source military term systems and its counterpart in the target language set obstacles for translation, especially in the perspective of cognitive understanding. The translation of “air” involved military terms from A Penetrated Dictionary of United States Military Terms are used as examples in this paper to illustrate the semantic translation paths and the possible reasons in the military term translation process from the perspective of cognitive domains. While translating military terms, translators should understand and identify the general semantic connotations of military terms in the three different cognitive domains, i.e., space domain, action domain and war domain; and then should choose the proper diction based on path matching, and finally examine and revise according to military knowledge system.

Key words: military terms, cognitive domains, semantic translation paths