This paper is a preliminary attempt to connect, within the field of translation studies, the following: firstly, the results of the latest empirical studies on the role of mental simulation in the processing of the text; secondly, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ideas concerning effective history; thirdly, the main tenets of spatiality and of cognitive narratology. One of the goals of the paper is also to attempt to demonstrate how the legacy of both hermeneutics and cognitive sciences might be reconciled in order to offer a new analytical approach and investigative framework which could suggest an interesting developmental trajectory within translational hermeneutics. Building on Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik’s (2012) views on intersubjectivity – that is, the ability to adopt someone else’s perspective as well as to read someone’s mind – I will attempt to demonstrate to what extent the target text (here, the earliest Polish translation of Anne of Green Gables from 1912) might be analysed by translation scholars in the light of the translator’s ability to empathize with the author in regards to the narratological devices used in the source text, as well as in light of the target text reader’s and the translator’s potential sensorimotor and perceptual activities being performed in their minds while creating a translation and while receiving it by the reader of the translation.
