Abstract Cognitive translation emerged as an important part of translation studies development in the 1980s and 1990s, and reached a new level in 2010. This study, employing CiteSpace and VOSviewer to analyze articles retrieved from the WoS core database from 2012 to 2021, presents the growing trends in cognitive translation studies. The results are as follows: (1) Sweden and the University of Ottawa unfold the most cooperation with the rest of the world as country and institution, respectively. (2) Szarkowska is the author who has published the most articles in the past ten years, and those who are most frequently cited are Wild and Beaton. (3) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) is the journal that remains the highest level and quantity of academic output thanks to its highest H-index, and JMAM Journal of the American Medical Association is the most influential one in the field in 2021 due to its highest IF (Impact Factor). (4) The area of the brain where researchers highly focus on exploring cognitive activity is the hippocampus; the cognitive load has been the emerging trend in the past ten years and will continue to be trending for years to come; functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a dominant tool in cognitive neuroscience, is wildly adopted in studies of translators’ mental activity, and researchers also focus on methods like eye tracking to investigate the mental activity. Nevertheless, in the pursuit of reliability and validity, multivariate inter certification should be adopted in researches in mental translation studies.