Shaping mental imagery through translation techniques: A cognitive analysis of Foguoji from a visual grammar perspective

Mental imagery supports comprehension, meaning-making, and emotional engagement, yet limited research has explored how translation techniques modulate it. Drawing on grounded cognition, Event Segmentation Theory, Cognitive Load Theory, and Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammar, this study tests how amplification, division, and combination affect perceived narrative process, size of frame, and salience. Twenty MTI students, purposively and stratifiedly sampled for demographic and training diversity, read one Foguoji passage and four English translations in a within-subject design after structured training in visual grammar categories. Amplification generally enlarged frame size without increasing counts, though explanatory amplification showed context-dependent size shifts; division raised counts when paired with lexical enrichment but had mixed size effects; and combination reduced counts while increasing semantic saturation and perceived complexity. Lexical/cultural specification enhanced salience through cultural anchoring, sensory granularity, and explicit actional vectors, whereas generalization or mistranslation attenuated it. These patterns suggest that translation techniques act as cognitive modulators, reshaping event granularity, attentional focus, and cultural resonance. The proposed Visual-Grammatical Translation Cognition Model (VGTCM) integrates vector modulation, cognitive load distribution, and cultural anchoring, and offers a structured framework for modeling imagery effects in translation.