Mao Cui, Eunhae Oh. 2018. The effect of lexical frequency in modulating translation asymmetries on L2 learners. Language and Information, 22.1, 57-71. The study examined response time in Chinese-English two-way translation in order to explore the role of word frequency in modulating translation asymmetries between forward and backward translation. 23 Chinese learners of English at two different proficiency levels performed a word translation task of 90 concrete nouns, one-syllable in English words and two characters in Chinese words. The results showed that there were asymmetries between the two translation directions, with backward translation taking significantly longer time than forward translation. Word frequency played a role in modulating the asymmetries in that translating high-frequency items, regardless of direction, took significantly shorter time than the mid- and low-frequency items. But backward translation displayed larger magnitude of sensitivity to the variation of frequency than forward translation. It was suggested that both forward and backward translation were conceptually-mediated with differing strength in the linking between the lexical items and their conceptual representations, being stronger with high-frequency items than mid- and low-frequency items. Conceptual activation is easier for high frequency items.