The present study applies Dr. He Yuanjian’s CMT (Conceptual Mapping Theory) to focus on the strategy use of translating Chinese folklore concepts in Hong Lou Meng (i.e. indigenous concepts related to etiquettes and customs) by Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang on the observations of the translators’strategies and the distributional tendencies of translation strategies so as to testify CMT on empirical grounds. Whether it holds true that the preservation of the alien source concepts through translation depends on how successfully they are mapped into the target conceptual system leads to the attempts to study on the distributional tendency of translation strategies of translation tasks, especially, of translating folkloric concepts in this paper. As a result, the tentative outcome of the data observed supports that the concept-mediation theoretic approach to translation pro?cess seems able to account for how cognitive constraints affect the production of mapping the unshared concepts.