ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilinguals translate concrete, abstract, and emotion words. These two populations were selected because of the different orthographic structure of their native languages, and because these specific bilinguals residing within the United States tend to have high levels of proficiency in both languages. All participants had normal visual acuity and no known reading disorders. The stimuli used by Tokowicz and colleagues were those selected from previously published translation experiments, suggesting that these items were good representatives of those used in the bilingual literature. All responses were scored by three native Spanish speakers for the Spanish data and three native Mandarin speakers for the Chinese data, all of whom were from the same population as those who participated in the norming experiment. Social and cultural issues are at play in that others have shown that similarities and differences exist across cultures in how emotions are categorized.
