Earticle

MTI programs in industry-specific universities have drawn little scholarly attention due to their short history and small scale, but they have irreplaceable advantages in training translators for specific industries because of their time-honored and well-established industry-specific disciplines and programs. For this reason, this paper focuses on MTI programs in 16 industry-specific universities, all of which were granted the right in 2014 and subjected to the assessments by China National Committee for Translation & Interpreting Education in 2018. These universities cover a variety of industries, including civil aviation, medicine, forestry, agriculture, post and telecommunications, architecture, ocean, petrol, electric power and water resources. By inspecting assessment data such as teachers, students, training objectives, programs and characteristic courses, as well as horizontal communications with other disciplines of the respective universities and with language services companies; and by interviewing some teachers from the universities concerned, the authors discuss the merits and demerits of these MTI programs. The paper concludes by drawing some implications on translator training at the national, university and individual levels in China and beyond.

This paper tries to analyze the strategies used in the translation of metaphors of President Xi Jinping’s popular quotes and sayings selected and summarized from six public speech scripts delivered in 2018. Using the Metaphor Identify Procedure (MIP) proposed by the Pragglejaz Team in 2007, this paper identifies 12 types of conceptual metaphors in the data and focused on those popular and influential quotes and sayings from a cultural perspective. Applying theoretical frameworks in post-classical narratology (especially Mona Baker’s narrative theory) first put forward and developed by David Herman and concepts in cognitive linguistics, it investigates how metaphors of the public speech scripts, with unique Chinese characteristics meanwhile, were translated in the Chinese media. By drawing on the strong points of Baker’s narrative theory, it makes a comprehensive narrative account of the translation process for Xi’s speech in the broad sense, namely, narrative material selection before the translation, narrative framing (re-narration) during the translation and narrative reception after the translation, with a focus on the narrative reframing process, in other words, the translation process of Xi’s speech in the narrow sense. After that, several conclusions are obtained: in the narrative framing process, the translator makes a re-narration from narrative time, narrative perspective and narrative structure on the micro textual level. In the narrative reception, three commonly used strategies in the translation of metaphors in Xi’s speeches are proposed to improve the narrative reception effect for the receptors’ sake, namely, reproducing the same image of the metaphor in the target language, replacing the image of the metaphor with a familiar one in the target language, and abandoning the image of the metaphor while translating the meaning of the image instead. Meanwhile, those strategies found out to properly reflect the manifold characteristics of the popular quotes and sayings and demonstrate the constant propagandistic practice of the Chinese media.

This paper is a study of effective Chinese-Korean Sight Translation. Sight Translation is a very important training process in consecutive and simultaneous interpretation. The Korean and Chinese languages are quite different in terms of linguistic types. When interpreting, the Chinese-Korean interpreter may make mistakes if she cannot fully understand the text due to the time limit. There are many causes for language errors, but the difference in the linguistic types is one of the main ones. In order to overcome these linguistic differences and to achieve effective Sight Translation results, this study proposes the segmentation method. The segmentation method is dividing sentences into semantic units and translating the segmented units in order. However, the segmented semantic unit must be reconfigured to match the grammar structure of the target language. Three methods were proposed as effective training methods for Chinese-Korean Sight Translation. First, in Chinese, there are many sentences where the subject does not appear. Therefore, it is necessary to supplement the subject or supplement the subject and object of the sentence when interpreting into the target Korean language. Second, segmenting one long Chinese sentence into multiple Korean sentences. Third, fully understanding the conjunctive cohesion devices at the end of the Chinese sentence and transferring it to the accurate cohesive device in Korean. When the above three methods are utilized well, it is possible to eliminate obstacles to the speed, accuracy, logic and fluency of the interpreter and thus the interpretation can be effective.

With the ever increasing globalization and interdependencies in economic development as well as economic development, China is in growing demand for qualified translators and interpreters. And this calls for the supply of translation education programmes at university level. With its launch in 2007, China’s Master in Translation and Interpreting (MTI) programme has seen its dramatic growth over the past decade. However, what an MTI programme should aim for has remained a question under debate. The paper reviews the discipline context of Translation Studies as well as the history and recent development of translation programmes in China. The paper also examines the justification of underlying curriculum reform with the inclusion of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) as one of the core modules for MTI. And this will be done by the review and introduction of multiple well developed research projects/models and particular emphasis will be put on the review of a project promoting intercultural communicative competence for translation students. It concludes recent work from pedagogical /education oriented translation competence, arguing that a more holistic understanding of the translation curriculum must be reflected in series of the narrow, jobspecific- competence-based training programme.

Contemporary Chinese notions of translation have to be understood against a globalized world where international trading and business transactions are the order of the day. This paper proposes to discuss one current school of thinking about translation in China. In the past decade or so, translation has been seen as playing a crucial part in exporting Chinese culture in order to build a favorable national image and increase the country’s soft power. This has occurred as a result of the perception of an imbalance between the importation of things foreign (qing jinlai) and the exportation of things Chinese (song chuqu). To compete successfully on the international scene, cultural exports have to be promoted. Since globalization forces are dominating the scene, translation becomes an “industry” governed by the operational logic of a “socialist market economy”—a notion unheard of two decades ago. While translation can still be seen as inter-linguistic transfer, its value is no longer to be judged on the basis of whether the rendering is faithful or not. The “classical” theories of translation—wen (refinement), zhi (straightforwardness), xindaya (faithfulness, fluency and elegance), zhiyi (literal translation) and yiyi (free translation)—are slowly losing ground to the new conceptualizations of translation in the contemporary world, and the present paper focuses on the one most discussed, debated and disseminated in the past two decades or so.