Setting the stage

This chapter establishes the theoretical foundation for examining cognitive retention in translation through Talmy’s force dynamics framework. It introduces the intersection between cognitive linguistics and translation studies, focusing on how conceptual structures are preserved in translated texts rather than real-time cognitive processes. The research explores literary and audiovisual translation across English, Finnish, and Polish, testing the cognitive retention hypothesis that target texts maintain cognitive similarities with source texts despite linguistic differences. The chapter outlines Talmy’s four conceptual schematic systems (configurational structure, perspective, attention, and force dynamics), emphasising their application to translation analysis and cross-linguistic meaning transfer.