Earticle

Toolan discussed narrative progression in the short story by a corpus stylistic approach and proposed core signalling of four narrative parameters, but he did not fully consider the time factor in the text. This study tries to apply the core signalling to the English translation of a non-linear Chinese story and discovers that the degree of the roles played by the four narrative parameters for narrative progression varies in the translation. The reason is that low frequency of finite verbs plays a limited role in narrative progression, while it is the other way around for the other three narrative parameters. The situation is similar to the original Chinese story. Though there are some shifts, generally speaking, the narrative progression in English translation corresponds with the original work. The study finds that this is related to the type of the story. Non-linear short story means that the time in the story is non-linear, while verbs are usually related to time. So, in order to blur time in the narrative, the story used verbs less and depended on the other parameters more for narrative progression.

Translation is a process of transferring an original test, known as the source text (ST) to equivalent one known as the target text (TT). Translation techniques are considered as instrument of textual analysis that allows us to study how translation equivalence works in relation to the source text. Translation techniques are indispensable for translating process. The translators need to use various translation techniques while formulating an equivalence for transferring elements of meaning from source text to target text. The aim of this research is to clarify the notion of translation techniques by focusing on existing definitions and classifications of translation techniques. Terminological, conceptual and classification confusions are pointed out as well. Various Translation techniques are discussed distinguishing them from translation methods, procedures and strategies. The Urdu Translation of the preface of the book “The reconstruction of The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam” by Muhammad Iqbal shall be analysed in the light of various translation techniques to know how translation techniques contribute as a tool of textual analysis, to transfer the message of source text (English) to the readers of Urdu language. This research also investigate how the translation techniques formulated the equivalence between ST (English) and TT (Urdu) bearing in mind that translation is an activity of mediating meaning from a source language into a target language. The study will also discuss various challenges faced a translator while applying a particular translation technique like calque, borrowing, literal translation, transposition, modulation, functional equivalence, and adaptation during translating process. Finally, some recommendation and solutions will be presented in this regard.

The paper discusses the relation between error tendency and translation quality in additional translation with the Chinese-Japanese translation corpus for patent name as a subject of the study. The paper divides errors of additional translation into three classes: Additional translation [missed]: there is no additional translation if the additional translation is necessary; Additional translation [excessive]: there is an additional translation if the additional translation is unnecessary; Additional translation [wrong]: there is an additional translation if the additional translation is necessary, but the additional translation is wrong. The corpus adopted for the study is Chinese-Japanese translation corpus with 676 translated patent documents provided by a translation company in Dalian, including the Chinese original version, Japanese version translated by translators with Chinese nationality and Japanese version proofread by proofreaders with Japanese nationality. The proofreaders graded the translated documents in the corpus into 5 grades based on the translation quality, i.e. translation versions with grade 1, 2 and 3 have low translation quality and with grade 4 and 5 have high translation quality. The corpus consists of 55 translated patent documents with grade 5 (8%), 473 translated patent documents with grade 4 (70%), 130 translated patent documents with grade 3 (19%) and 18 translated patent documents with grade 2 (3%). The study conclusion is as follows: 1. Among the translation errors, errors of additional translation account for more than 50%, take the second place among errors in translation versions with low quality and take the first place among errors in translation versions with high quality. 2. Among the errors of additional translation, missed translation accounts for more than 70% and is positively related to the translation quality; excessive translation accounts for 10%~30% and isn’t related to the translation quality; wrong translation accounts for less than 10% and isn’t related to the translation quality. 3. Among the errors of additional translation, functional word errors account for more than 90% and content word errors account for less than 10%. A Japanese auxiliary word, “no”, takes the first place and isn’t related to the translation quality.

The 21st century is a robust era for innovative translation and translator training. Based on an analysis of changes and challenges confronting translation profession, this presentation calls for setting the development of rhetorical competence as a goal in training programs for translators, and for using simultaneously sourced parallel texts, in conjunction with a rhetorically oriented contrastive approach, as an effective avenue to the teaching of translation, particularly from Chinese into English. To justify this proposal, the presentation argues that parallel texts not only can serve as a useful tool for practicing translation, but would also offer rich resources for acquiring, generating, renewing and expanding relevant knowledge. Adopting such an approach will enable students to ‘borrow’ from parallel texts and deepen their own understanding of what is behind the different expressions of different languages, so as to be better prepared for taking up translation tasks in the real world.

In the recent years, under the condition that the Chinese Army’s opening-up fields are getting enlarged and that its forms are getting diversified and intensity getting improved, Chinese soldiers are performing more actively in the international stages. Developing the international military cooperation holds great significance for the improvement of strategic mutual understanding, and the maintenance of worldwide and regional peace and stability. In August 2018, the sea-landing competition of “International Military Contest-2018” was held in Fujian, China. As the representative of Chinese Navy, I joined in the whole translation work of the competition, accumulating precious experience of military translation. By summarizing the translation experience of the contest, the paper aims at combing through possible problems when carrying out this kind of military contest task henceforward, and at studying relevant solutions and translation strategies.

Translating can be considered as the process which switches one semiotic entity into another in a semiotic approach, under certain equivalent conditions to do with semiotic codes, pragmatic action and general communicative goals. In order to perceive full communicative purpose of an utterance in translation, we need to comprehend not only the pragmatic action, but also a semiotic dimension which control the interaction of different discoursal elements as signs. A semiotic function is also incarnated by idiolect and dialect. It is known that most of modern Arab writers are encouraged to write a formal classical style using Modern Standard Arabic that is the only style felt to be appropriate for literature in Arab cultures. However, in reality Arab writers including Naguib Mahfuz who won the Nobel prize in the literature in 1988, use ‘ammiyyah al-muthaqqafiin’ colloquial of the cultured. Even he called using colloquial Arabic in literature as a disease, he uses spoken Arabic form that is heavily influenced by modern standard Arabic (MSA) in dialogues of his novels This study examines the translatability of non-Modern Standard Arabic which is performed by such as dialects, colloquial expressions, some features like Arabic genitive construct(idaafa) and foreign loanwords in Naguib Mahfuz’s novels which translated in Korean. This paper calls for adopting a more semiotic perspective when translating unique texts filled with cultural and socio-political meanings.

2019 is the 120th birth anniversary of Lao She (1899-1966), a famous Chinese contemporary novelist and dramatist. He was one of the most significant figures of 20th-century Chinese literature, and best known for his novel Rickshaw Boy and other works. With a dozen teaching-material samples, this paper aims to review the narrative element in the English translation version of Camel Xiangzi—A Beijing Opera (Chinese script by Zhong Wennong, English rendition by Chen Rong) in terms of “story” and “discourse analysis”, and to expose the technical details behind, with proper attention to literary facts concerned with Lao She’s original novel version and madame Zhong’s own Chinese script version in particular. Based on the assumption that the order in story is fixed even if the discourse presents a different order, the main text focuses on three sections: A. narrative structuring, B. characters as narrators in story-events weaving, C. Beijing opera aria-singing and its counterparts, in order to analyze opera narrative as an independent system--this play, the continuum of events presupposing the total set of all conceivable events revolving around the hero Xiangzi (i.e.how his-storia of the rickshaw-puller becomes history)--with an eye to pay due respect to glocal (local +global) dissemination efforts at homeland audience as well as overseas readership.

At present, the main courses for postgraduates of translation and interpreting in China are mainly focused on skill development, but most of them will not be full-time professional translators or interpreters. They will engage in other professions, using their skills and expertise in translation and interpreting as part of their professional advantage. On the other hand, driven by national policies, China’s fourth wave of entrepreneurship has swept all fields and industries. With their potential of being expert-generalist in various fields, translation and interpreting postgraduates have their own entrepreneurial and innovative advantages. The special environment in China and the students’ qualities per se, therefore, make entrepreneurship and innovation (E&I) education courses as necessary as their skill courses. If provided with an E&I curriculum system integrating their own expertise in translation and interpreting, they will be more adaptive and qualified for their future entrepreneurial career. This paper proposes an E&I curriculum system designed for the postgraduates of translation and interpreting, including at least three modules: general E&I courses, customized E&I courses, and E&I practice courses. The main content of these courses and the major issue of how to incorporate these postgraduates’ uniqueness and specialty into the curriculum system will also be discussed.

In 2016 the Chinese-Portuguese-English Machine Translation Laboratory was established by Macao Polytechnic Institute, GuangDong University of Foreign Studies and Global Tone Communication Technology, which aims to assist Macao S.A.R. to be the Trade Service Platform between China and Portuguesespeaking Countries, as well as to provide different innovative applied services. After three years’ investigation and data collection, according to BLEU evaluation test, its translation (cnpt) is better than that of the platforms of Google and Baidu, especially in terms of adequacy and fluency. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of space to get improved with the help of manual post-edition, which is proved to be the most effective method of quality improvement for machine translation. By studying the Chinese-Portuguese translations of the new year’s message of Presidente Xi Jingping in 2019, one by machine and the other by a professional, this article describes the different solutions of the two versions, analyzes their solutions facing the fundamental linguistic differences (hypotactic vs. paratactic, topic prominent vs subject prominent) and proposes key-aspects of improvement towards the insufficiencies of the present stage of machine translation.